Sublime – Uncanny - Abject

A Poetics of Gothic

Angelika ReichmannEszterházy Károly College, Eger, Hungary

Outline

I. Definitions of the literary Gothic

II. Emergence of the genreIII.Major figures and works

(1764-1820)IV. Poetics: Conventions and

devices

I. DEFINITIONS OF THE LITERARY GOTHIC

1) Period genre“’Gothic’ is most usually applied to a group

of novels written between the 1760s and the 1820s” (Punter 1)

Gothic Fiction = Romantic Fiction (Anne Williams)

Gothic conventions, stock elements: portraying the terrifying persecuted heroine villain (dark, denomic) archaic setting (haunted Gothic castles) supernatural elements stereotypical characters (terrified heroines,

villain, monsters: ghosts, vampires, werewolves) suspense convention of framed narratives (Kilgour 5) conscious mixture of genres, feeds on other

texts, “monstrosity” of the genre, intertextuality (Kilgour 4)

the effect on the reader is in the focus (Kilgour 6)

2) Pulp/low-brow genre

“’Gothic’ is the term which publishers still use to sell a particular genre of paperback historical romance” which applies “a certain set of narrative and stylistic conventions” (Punter 2)

Conventions: ghosts (supernatural elements)aristocratic charactersmatching setting (castle, high society) love-plot in the centreno historical distancing

3) Genre in American fiction“a description of a certain kind of American

fiction of which the main practitioners are usually taken to be Joyce Carol Oates, John Hawkes and Flannery O’Connor […] a literature of psychic grotesquerie” (Punter 3)

Characteristic features: landscapes of the mind (psyche of the

protagonist)setting: connected with the American Southfeeling of degeneracypsychic and social decayviolence, breakdown, rape

4) Synonym for horror as a genre“horror fiction itself, in the common form of

the ghost story” (Punter 4) 19th- and 20th-century, and contemporary

descendants of Gothic as a period genreFiction and film

The Ring (1998)

5) High-brow literature indebted to the Gothic tradition“there are many contemporary and near-

contemporary writers who have nothing to do with any of these genres, and yet who in one way or another regard themselves as personally indebted to the Gothic tradition” (Punter 4) – e.g. Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson

Characteristic features: sense of recapturing historyself-conscious un-realisma mode of revealing the unconsciousconnections with the primitive, the

barbaric, the tabooed

• Widespread influence on contemporaries and posterity

• After the 1850s – no Gothic as independent genre (Punter 11-12)

• “Articulating different, popular and often marginalised forms of writing in periods and genres privileged as Romanticism, Realism and Modernism, Gothic writing emerges as the thread that defines British literature. In the United States, where the literary canon is composed of works in which the influence of romances and Gothic novels is far more overt, literature again seems virtually an effect of a Gothic tradition. Gothic can perhaps be called the only true literary tradition. Or its stain.” (Botting 16, italics mine)

II. EMERGENCE OF THE GENRE

1) 18th-century re-definition of Gothic• Gothic 1: “‘to do with the Goths’ or with

the barbarian northern tribes who played so somewhat unfairly reviled a part in the collapse of the Roman empire” “virtually a synonym for ‘Teutonic’ or ‘Germanic’, while retaining its connotations of barbarity” (Punter 4-5)

• Gothic 2: focus on the historical aspectsall things medieval (= everything up to the

1650s)antonym of classical

• Re-definition combined with re-valuation in 1750s

a) Gothic as reaction against Neo-Classicism

Neo-Classical• well-ordered• simple• pure• harmonious

• set of cultural models

Gothic• chaotic• ornate

• convoluted• excess• exaggerated• wild• uncivilised

(Punter 4-5)Gothic: act of defiance against the

conventional realistic mode and the dominant principle of reason

b) Gothic as critique of bourgeois values

Gothic• organic model

• body politic• (idealised)

medieval past• group identity• external

regulation

Modern/Bourgeois• artificial• mechanistic, atomic• social contract• the present bourgeois

society

• autonomy and independence

• self-regulating individual

(Kilgour 10-11)

2) Gothic revival as a cultural phenomenon

1760-1770s: general cultural Gothic revival → sources of the Gothic as a genrerediscovery of the ancient British heritage

(Welsh and Gaelic)collection of folk poetry (ballads)rediscovery of English medieval poetry

(Chaucer)rediscovery of the Elizabethans (Spenser

and others)+ fascination with Gothic architecture (for

them: mostly ecclesiastical medieval buildings between the 12th and 16th centuries) → building Gothic castles in the 18th century, even ready-made ruins (Punter 6-7)

3) Other cultural contexts• Age of revolutions

Gothic: strong political implications (Punter 14)

• Age of reason Supernatural experiences

• Sacred – status of legitimising narratives shaken

• Source of fear (terror/horror) (cf. Dolar 7)• New reading audience (middle-class,

female)debates about the moral dangers of reading

• Gothic: amoral and escapist (Kilgour 6-7)• reading as self-determination• reading as a socially subversive phenomenon

(Kilgour 6)

4) Literary sources

• Gothic elements in the sentimental novel (Tobias Smollett, Richardson, Clarissa, 1748)

• graveyard poetry (Edward Young, Night Thoughts 1742-45, Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” 1751)

• theory of the sublime (Edmund Burke, Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 1756)

• heavy reliance on the poetry of defiance (Milton, Paradise Lost 1667 – the figure of Satan) (Kilgour 40)

(Punter 20-41)

III. MAJOR FIGURES AND WORKS

• Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)

• Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1796)

• Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1795)• William Godwin, Things as They Are or

The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794)• Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria or the Wrongs

of Woman (1798)• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)• C. R. Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

(1820)

IV. POETICS: CONVENTIONS AND DEVICES

1) Plot: male vs. female Gothic

a) Male Gothic

male identity – autonomous, pushed to the

extremes

oedipal rivalry → the well-meaning individual

becomes an outcast, no place for him in

society, alienation (Bildungsroman) – tragic

overreacher (Williams 103)

later: Byronic hero, revolutionary aesthetic

(Kilgour 37-38)

Fascination with female suffering (Williams

105)

Loss of mind and/or life (Williams 103)

b) Female Gothic

• female identity – relational Daughter’s identification with the mother,

delayed integration into societyHorrors=momentary and pleasurable

suspense before the inevitable end, marriage – compulsory happy ending (Williams 103)

Ending/resolution: often unsatisfactory (Kilgour 8-9)

Surface: Gothic - conservative genre: reinforces norms, reactionary, bourgeois aesthetic (Kilgour 37-38)

Ambiguous, paradoxical genre (Botting 8-9)Centre of attention for feminist critics since

the 1970s – texts of women writers (e.g. Ellen Moers, Tania Modleski, Gilbert-Gubar “madwoman in the attic”)

Mythic/Fairy-tale plot patterns for female GothicTania Modleski: female Gothic texts - sense of

confinement and paranoid delusions caused by marriage → fantasies: husband – enemy/monster threatening the heroine’s life (59-63)

• “Eros and Psyche” /“Beauty and the Beast” Forced marriage Happiness Secret (monstrous? divine?) identity of the

husband Female transgression (discovering the secret) Wandering and trials (mother-in-law) –

acceptance of feminine identity Reunion with husband – mutual transformation,

successful Bildung• “Bluebeard”

(Williams 141-158)identification with the maternal model for

femininity (Williams 155), but: masochism, acceptance of victimisation (Modleski 68-71)

2) Setting in female Gothic

• Gothic castle (later mansion, simply house)Symbolic of the villainous

husbandSymbolic of patriarchal society

FatherSymbolicLaw

Confinement/prison/torture chamber

Secret: earlier victim: both a threat and a helper for the heroineWoman behind the veil“Madwoman in the attic”Maternal figure

3) Villains and heroes in female Gothic• restaging of “unresolved oedipal conflicts”

in relation to the father• “splitting” of the male character

“super-male” - apparent villain who turns out to be the real hero

“shadow-male” - seemingly nice and sensitive character who is revealed to be “vicious, insane and/or murderous”, or simply too weak

modern female Gothic: demand for happy ending → reunion of the two figures: “unlikely combination of qualities” (Modleski 73-9)

• heroine: plays a more active role in saving herself, or actually saves herself

4) Supernatural elements• Sources of fear – horror and terror

“Terror, [...], is associated with subjective elevation, with the pleasures of imaginatively transcending or overcoming fear and thereby renewing and heightening a sense of self and social value: threatened with dissolution, the self, [...], reconstitutes its identity against the otherness and loss presented in the moment of terror. [...] In the process, fear and its darkly obscure object is externalised and limits are reconstituted between inside and outside. [...] [H]orror describes the movement of contraction and recoil. [...] Terror expels after horror glimpses invasion, reconstituting the boundaries that horror has seen dissolve.” (Botting 10)

• 18th century: terror dominates – sublime• 19th century: horror dominates – uncanny

(double), abject (Botting 10-11)

a) The sublimeBeautiful

• Small• Smooth and polished• Shuns the right line• OR deviates from it

insensibly

• Light, delicatePLEASURE

Sublime• Vast• Rugged and negligent• Follows the right line• OR deviates from it

remarkably • Obscure, dark and

gloomy• Solid, massive

PAIN“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

(Burke 549)

b) The uncanny• “if this is indeed the secret nature of the

uncanny, we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche [‘homely’] into its opposite, das Unheimliche (p. 226); for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. [...] the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix ‘un’ [‘un-’] is the token of repression.” (Freud)– Improbable repetitions, returns (from the dead)– Connected to the fear of castration (Freud)

• Experience of the uncanny – epistemological castration (Samuel Weber)

A special case of the uncanny: the double• “For the ‘double’ was originally an insurance

against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’, [...]; and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is found of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of a genital symbol. [...] Such ideas, [...], have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.” (Freud)

• Rivals• Double – mirror image with the gaze (Dolar 8)• Usually tragic outcome (madness and/or

death)

c) The abject • Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror – an Essay on

Abjection • “Every social order defines itself as opposed to the

non-signified, the non-structured. […] the marginalised segments and elements are under the laws of prohibition and taboo: the filthy, the disgusting, the dirty, the perverse, the heterogeneous. The term abject includes all these elements that are not fixed symbolically, which are hardly encodable and are menacing for culture. The abject is the most archaic experience of the subject, which is neither an object nor the subject, but already articulates separation by marking the future space of the subject in relation to the disgusting, to the heterogeneous, and to the terrifying. […] it threatens symbolic fixation and the formation of the identity. The aspect of the abject most imminently and constantly threatening the subject is the very existence and feeling of the body: it is this uncontrollable structure full of streams and flows that language, the word, and discourse must totally cover so that the subject can feel her/himself a homogeneous monad.” (Kiss 9 – trans. Nóra Séllei)

• More typical for male Gothic (Williams 105)

• Sublime– Castle of Otranto

• Uncanny (double)– Frankenstein– Jane Eyre– The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde– The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Abject– Frankenstein– The Picture of Dorian Gray– Dracula

Works CitedBotting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996.Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of

the Sublime and Beautiful. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. V. B. Leitch. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2001: 539-550.

Dolar, Mladen. ’”I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding Night”: Lacan and the Uncanny.’ October 58 (Fall 1991): 5-23. JSTOR.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html

Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. New York and London: Routledge,1995.

Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror – an Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Kiss Attila Atilla. „Miből lesz a szubjektum?” Hódosy Annamária and Kiss Attila Atilla. Remix. Szeged: Ictus, 1996: 9-53.

Modleski, Tania. “The Female Uncanny: Gothic Romances for Women.” Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. New York: Routledge, 1990: 59-84.

Punter, David. The Gothic Tradition. The Literature of Terror – A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Vol. 1. London and New York: London, 1996.

Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness – A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.