Gothic and the Comic Turn

Gothic and the Comic Turn

Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik

Gothic and the Comic Turn

By the same authors LANDSCAPES OF DESIRE: Metaphors in Modern Women’s Fiction DAPHNE DU MAURIER: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination

Gothic and the Comic Turn Avril Horner and

Sue Zlosnik

© Avril M. Horner and Susan H. Zlosnik 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–77151–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Horner, Avril, 1947– Gothic and the comic turn / Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–77151–6 1. Gothic revival (Literature)—Great Britain. 2. Horror tales, English—History and criticism. 3. Humorous fiction, English—History and criticism. 4. Difference (Psychology) in literature. 5. Comic, The, in literature. 6. Fear in literature. I. Zlosnik, Sue, 1949– II. Title. PR830.T3H66 2005 820.9′11—dc22 2004052099 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

In loving memory of Daisy Gladys Lowe (Avril’s mother), whose sense of humour was often distinctly Gothic and Arthur T.C. Peters (Sue’s father), who loved a good joke and who enjoyed telling the bad ones too.

I’m not sure I understand myself why, at such a troubled time, I’m headed off in the frivolous direction of comic fiction. Carol Shields, Unless

Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1 The Late Romantic Turn

19

2 Realism and Romance

45

3 Towards Gothic Modernism

69

4 Topography and the Comic Gothic Turn

95

5 Women Writing Women

116

6 Men Writing Men

136

Afterword

165

Notes

167

Bibliography

191

Index

200

vii

Acknowledgements The seed for Gothic and the Comic Turn started to germinate some years ago, probably as an irreverent reaction to the scholarly earnestness with which Gothic literature was being promoted in university departments during the 1990s. It has taken us some time to bring our ideas to fruition, partly because the subject matter proved at times to be intractably difficult (not least because there is necessarily something of a contradiction in writing a solemn academic treatise on the comic). We are therefore very grateful to our various editors at Palgrave, who have extended our deadline more than once. Certain sections of this book started life as papers given at various conferences on the Gothic. These papers eventually materialized as book chapters and journal articles, some of which have been reworked for inclusion in this volume. We are therefore grateful to the editors and publishers of Gothic Studies for permission to reprint, in altered and condensed form, the articles ‘“Releasing Spirit from Matter”: Comic Alchemy in Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick and Mantel’s Fludd’ (Vol. 1, No. 2 [2000]), 136–147) and ‘Agriculture, Body Sculpture, Gothic Culture: Gothic Parody in Gibbons, Atwood and Weldon’ (Vol. 4, No. 2 [2002], 167–177). We also wish to thank the editors of Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text for permission to include a revised version of the online article ‘Dead Funny: Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine as Comic Gothic’ (Vol. 5, No. 2 [2000]). Our examination of George du Maurier’s Trilby had its genesis in an essay entitled ‘Comic Gothic’ written for A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter and published by Blackwell in 2000. The sections on Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust draw on two book chapters, ‘Strolling in the Dark: Gothic Flânerie in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood’, in Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace (eds), Gothic Modernisms (Palgrave, 2001) and ‘Unreal cities and undead legacies: T.S. Eliot and Gothic hauntings in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Barnes’s Nightwood’ in Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett (eds), Special Relationships: Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms, 1854–1936 (Manchester University Press, 2002). Our discussion of Barbara Comyns’ The Vet’s Daughter draws on an article entitled ‘Skin Chairs and Other Domestic Horrors: Barbara Comyns and Female Gothic’, which will be published in Gothic Studies in 2005. We are grateful to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to viii

Acknowledgements ix

reproduce a sentence from Carol Shields’s novel Unless (published by Fourth Estate in 2002). We also wish to thank colleagues who have engaged with our ideas over the last few years and who helped us move on in our thinking. In particular, the following deserve special mention for their constant encouragement and faith in the project: Janet Beer, Fred Botting, Jerrold E. Hogle, William Hughes, Terry Phillips, David Punter, Andy Smith, Ursula Tidd and Anne Williams. Perhaps the final acknowledgement should be wryly accorded to Peter L. Berger who, in his book Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience, notes that: ‘people who write books on the comic are legitimate targets for parody, satire and other aggressive modes of the humorous response to intolerable seriousness’ (p. xv). Avril Horner Sue Zlosnik

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Introduction

Although Gothic writing is now safely established within the academy, its comic dimension has received very little critical attention. Indeed, most accepted definitions of Gothic writing resolutely ignore its comic aspect. In his ground-breaking, Freudian-Marxist study of the Gothic, The Literature of Terror, published in 1980, David Punter defines three elements that lie at the ‘heart’ of Gothic writing; these are: the concept of paranoia, the notion of the barbaric and the nature of the taboo – ‘aspects of the terrifying to which Gothic constantly, and hauntedly, returns’.1 The Literature of Terror presents Gothic writing as a textual engagement with profound social collective neuroses, the study of which can teach us much about cultural and political oppression. This set the tone for many critical works of the 1980s and early 1990s, during which time Gothic moved in from the margins to become a respectable area of academic enquiry within literary studies. Despite disputes concerning ever more inclusive definitions of Gothic (which Maurice Lévy, for example, thinks far too inclusive2), most critics would probably agree that Gothic writing always concerns itself with boundaries and their instabilities, whether between the quick/the dead, eros/thanatos, pain/ pleasure, ‘real’/‘unreal’, ‘natural’/‘supernatural’, material/transcendent, man/machine, human/vampire or ‘masculine’/‘feminine’. Such a concern with the permeability of boundaries, it has been suggested, manifests a deep anxiety about the coherence of the modern subject.3 Indeed, Gothic writers deliberately exploit the fear of the ‘Other’ encroaching upon the apparent safety of the post-Enlightenment world and the stability of the post-Enlightenment subject in order to achieve their effects. Thus, lines of confrontation between good and evil are invariably drawn up early in the plot of the Gothic novel, and satisfactory resolution depends upon the clear re-establishment of acceptable boundaries. 1

2 Gothic and the Comic Turn

However, the threat of their being breached again always remains: hence, of course, the rich progeny spawned by Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula. The effect of such texts is to generate fear: the Gothic text challenges the reader with the question ‘What are you afraid of?’ and, in bringing this question to the surface, therapeutically evokes feelings of horror, terror and revulsion.4 Unspeakable fears are frequently embodied in external threats such as the vampire or the monster. However, the form such threats take is influenced by historical moment; to that extent, abjection is both temporally and culturally inflected – what terrified the eighteenth-century reader will not frighten the twenty-first century cyberspace surfer.5 However, while form may change, certain characteristics of the Gothic remain constant. For example, while concerned, at the level of plot, to re-establish ‘good’, the Gothic text is frequently marked by an obsession with violence, darkness and death; with ‘evil’ as a supernatural force; and with the ‘uncanny’ as an inexplicable phenomenon. This is indeed Gothic as a literature of terror; a literature which reflects the fact that the ‘uncanny is inextricably bound up with the history of the Enlightenment and with European and North American Romanticism’.6 Seen in this light, Gothic writing can be construed as religious in the broadest sense of the word in that it functions to sustain the idea of transcendence in a society that has become increasingly secular since the Renaissance. Indeed, Fred Botting has noted that Gothic texts are ‘attempts to explain what the Enlightenment left unexplained, efforts to reconstruct the divine mysteries that reason had begun to dismantle’.7 Like melodrama (which Peter Brooks describes as ‘a form for a post-sacred era’), the Gothic text also polarizes and hyperdramatizes ‘forces in conflict’ in order to offer what he calls a ‘moral manichaeism’8 – made textually evident in the Gothic by that anxious play on boundaries we have already noted. It is not surprising then to find that, historically, melodrama emerges at the same moment as the Gothic, coming into its own at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Brooks argues that each nourished the other, but whereas melodrama tends ‘to move toward a clear nomination of the moral universe’9 by assigning good and evil to individuals, the Gothic – through its use of the eerie and the uncanny – sustains the notion of an immanent, inexplicable and terrifying world, albeit one in which God is dead or merely ineffective against diabolic forces. A marked critical preoccupation with the uncanny (as identified by Freud in his seminal essay entitled ‘The “Uncanny” ’, 1919) has resulted in the privileging of a methodology based on psychoanalysis that seeks

Introduction 3

to bring to the surface what is hidden in the Gothic text. This has resulted in a relative neglect of the formal play of surface effects, despite Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s pioneering work in this area.10 We shall argue in this book, then, that the orthodox account of what is Gothic does not seem to capture the hybridity of most Gothic novels, which includes their juxtaposition of incongruous textual effects. Such incongruity opens up the possibility of a comic turn in the presence of horror or terror. In this way, Gothic’s tendency to hybridity makes possible a mixed response to the loss of transcendence that characterizes the modern condition. Perhaps in the academy we have overlooked the comic in the Gothic – or too quickly pathologized it as the hysterical laughter of comic relief – in our desire to present Gothic texts as suitable cases for academic treatment. There are important essays by Paul Lewis, Victor Sage, Philip Stevick, Sybil Korff Vincent and Julian Wolfreys on the comic in specific Gothic texts but this area of enquiry does not appear to have become established in Gothic studies; there has, as yet, been no extended treatment of this topic.11 In this book we aim to trace a trajectory of comic Gothic from the hybrid The Castle of Otranto through to the 1980s. This is not, therefore, a comprehensive survey; in choosing exemplars, we have tended to identify texts that either have fallen into obscurity or have not yet been considered as suitable subjects for Gothic criticism. We thus want to offer here a rather different picture of Gothic writing. Some of the works examined in Gothic and the Comic Turn cannot be contained within the conventional Gothic aesthetic – and might well appear on first reading as merely diverting or ‘frivolous’. Yet in their own way they, too, explore the fragmented condition of the modern subject. In such texts, we seem to have a double remove, an inflection within an inflection, since in the Gothic comic turn – as in the joke – terror is suspended and horror is held in abeyance. If, as Brooks suggests, melodrama and the Gothic gesture theatrically towards a lost transcendence, then it could be argued that the comic within the Gothic offers a position of detachment and scepticism towards such cultural nostalgia. This is not simply to suggest that the Gothic comic turn functions as a fifth columnist for Enlightenment values. Rather, we see it as the beginning of a deconstructionist turn inherent within modernity. Such a perspective breaks the cultural twinning of the Gothic and the psychoanalytic in a proto-deconstructive impulse. It is not for nothing that Stella Gibbons sends Cousin Judith, the fixated Gothic mother, off for a luxurious bout of psychoanalytic treatment at the end of Cold Comfort Farm (1932). In similar vein, Patrick McGrath shows us the founding fathers of psychoanalysis literally cut down to size as little

4 Gothic and the Comic Turn

manikins in ‘The Skewer’ (1988). The comic turn in Gothic, we claim, is not an aberration or a corruption of a ‘serious’ genre; rather, it is intrinsic to a mode of writing that has been hybrid since its very inception. Just as Brooks argues that ‘the melodramatic mode is an inescapable dimension of modern consciousness’,12 we shall argue that the comic within the Gothic foregrounds a self-reflexivity and dialectical impulse intrinsic to the modern subject. Rather than setting up a binary between ‘serious’ and ‘comic’ Gothic texts, it is perhaps best to think of Gothic writing as a spectrum that, at one end, produces horror-writing containing moments of comic hysteria or relief and, at the other, works in which there are clear signals that nothing is to be taken seriously. The comic Gothic turn self-consciously uses Gothic’s propensity to bare the device in order to allay the reader’s learnt response of fear, horror and anxiety when encountering certain plots and tropes. Nevertheless, it still functions within Gothic as a critique of modernity. In this sense, the comic Gothic turn is the Gothic’s own doppelgänger. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, is usually defined as the first Gothic novel in English. This claim is incontestable, in so far as The Castle of Otranto was the first work to announce itself as ‘A Gothic Story’ – although, as E.J. Clery has pointed out, ‘it was at precisely the moment that Otranto was revealed to be a modern work that the adjective “gothic” was first applied to it’.13 Yet in this tale of death, incest, malevolent intrigue and the supernatural, Walpole offers his readers several moments of farcical humour, combining the uncanny and the melodramatic to comic effect. One of these takes place when Bianca, a young female servant, expresses her terror at having seen a supernaturally large hand within the confines of the castle: At that instant Bianca burst into the room, with a wildness in her look and gestures that spoke the utmost terror. Oh! my lord, my lord!’ cried she, we are all undone! It is come again! It is come again! – What is come again? cried Manfred, amazed. – Oh! the hand! the giant! the hand! – Support me! I am terrified out of my senses, cried Bianca: ‘I will not sleep in the castle tonight. Where shall I go? My things may come after me to-morrow. – Would I had been content to wed Francesco! This comes of ambition!14 Bianca’s servant perspective, with her concern about her ‘things’, strikes an incongruous note of practicality and materialism in the midst of high feeling presented so melodramatically. As Richard DavenportHines has noted, ‘Walpole (who always enjoyed harlequinades) devised

Introduction 5

exclamatory dialogues which were consistently camp.’15 Bianca’s immediate concern about what she owns (not much, presumably) and what she should or should not strive for in a rapidly changing social world (‘Would I had been content to wed Francesco!’) comically relativizes the larger themes of inheritance, primogeniture, property, marriages of convenience and aristocratic lineage that inform the main plot. There are many such moments in Walpole’s novel. In his second preface to The Castle of Otranto, published in 1765, Horace Walpole provocatively drew attention to the hybrid nature of his work, proudly announcing its blending of ancient romance (tales of chivalry and myth) with modern romance (the eighteenth-century novel) and, in the spirit of Shakespeare, the mingling of the tragic and the comic within the same text.16 This retrieval of the bard’s agenda had much to do with the construction of an English national identity that separated itself off from European culture, including Voltaire’s judgement that to mix buffoonery and solemnity was ‘intolerable’.17 Walpole’s polemical preface thus thumbs the nose at the eighteenth-century embrace of Enlightenment taxonomies which influenced the editing of Shakespeare’s plays, ‘correcting’ them by eliminating, amongst other things, the very hybrid elements that make Shakespeare’s work so distinctive. As E.J. Clery has noted: The excision of comic elements from the tragedies in the interests of increased probability and decorum had long been a part of English theatre practice. The Fool was removed from King Lear after Nahum Tate’s 1681 revision and Garrick, as part of his drive for the moral reformation of Drury Lane, left the Porter out of Macbeth, and would experimentally cut the Gravediggers from Hamlet in productions between 1773 and 1776. Generic impurity opposed the canons of neoclassicism and detracted from the function of moral illustration. Voltaire helped to alter the terms of the argument with his regular attacks on Shakespeare from 1733 to 1776, inadvertently shifting the issue from the universal rules of drama to the question of nationhood and its expression in literature.18 Whereas modern critics of the Gothic have been happy to accept the mingling of ancient with modern romance in The Castle of Otranto, they have been less interested in Walpole’s use of farce and humour. The critical reception of Walpole’s work as the first Gothic novel seems to have involved turning a blind eye to its more comic moments, as if these were somehow an embarrassing element in a text which provides

6 Gothic and the Comic Turn

the template for the conventions of Gothic fiction. Yet Walpole himself recognized the work’s comic elements: in writing to his friend Elie de Beaumont, he remarked ‘ “If I make you laugh, for I cannot flatter myself that I shall make you cry, I shall be content.” ’19 On learning that many readers were taking the novel seriously, he told Madame du Deffand, ‘presque tout le monde en fut le dupe’.20 However, by the time Clara Reeve was writing her novel The Old English Baron during the late 1770s, the excess that induces laughter was seen as a threat to the Gothic novel’s potential for inducing fear, perhaps because of the cultural assimilation of Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) during the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1777, anticipating Elizabeth Napier’s 1987 attack on the Gothic as absurdly extravagant,21 Clara Reeve castigates Walpole for embracing excess: a sword so large as to require an hundred men to lift it; a helmet that by its own weight forces a passage through a court-yard into an arched vault, big enough for a man to go through; a picture that walks out of its frame; a skeleton ghost in a hermit’s cowl . . .22 These memorable features of Walpole’s novel militated against the emotional realism that Clara Reeve sought.23 Fortunately, however, many subsequent Gothic writers have followed in Walpole’s footsteps rather than in Reeve’s, attracted by those very elements of humour, fakery and melodrama in The Castle of Otranto. This is not to say, of course, that Walpole’s novel does not have a serious, even tragic, dimension: its engagement with the transition from a feudal, aristocratic society to one in which status is based on property and on the maintenance of property through the suitable marriages of offspring is entirely topical; in that sense it relates keenly to the Marriage Act of 1753 which had been devised, it seems, to award ambitious parents more power so that they could prevent clandestine marriages taking place.24 Given its hybridity and its popularity, it is perhaps no coincidence that the rise of the Gothic novel is roughly contemporary not only with the birth of melodrama but also with the rise of the circus and of opera as popular entertainment.25 Indeed, Anne Williams sees the larger-than-life qualities of Walpole’s novel as closely related to opera, which Walpole attended regularly; on finding ‘there are nearly 600 references to opera in the index to the Yale edition of Walpole’s correspondence’, Williams concluded that ‘Horace Walpole went to the opera all the time’.26 Elevated now by exclusivity and expense, opera was not

Introduction 7

always regarded as high culture. John Dennis, writing in 1706, attacked opera as an art form that was foreign, effeminate and Gothic: there is something in the Italian Opera, which is Barbarous and Gothick . . . nothing can be more Gothick than an Opera, since nothing can be more oppos’d to the antient Tragedy, than the modern Tragedy in Musick; because, the one is reasonable, the other ridiculous; the one is artful, the other absurd; the one beneficial; the other pernicious; in short, the one natural, and the other monstrous.27 The creators of both early Gothic and early opera are, then, castigated for ignoring generic conventions; for embracing surface rather than depth; and for delight in excess – the result is ‘absurd’ and ‘monstrous’ works that make you laugh as well as cry. The same ambivalent response is evoked by both melodrama and the circus (in the latter case, particularly in the classic clown performances that seek to plumb the depths of pathos as well as the far reaches of helpless laughter).28 Once we accept that the Gothic is part of this complex and popular cultural response to modernity, and that the roots of the Gothic lie in the comic as well as the tragic, we are able to see later Gothic texts rather differently. For example, what Emma McEvoy calls ‘a dangerous sense of parody’ in The Monk we could simply see as Lewis daring to push the hybridity so evident in Walpole’s work to new extremes.29 Less obviously, perhaps, Ann Radcliffe’s work flirts with Walpole’s comic legacy. The Italian (1797) not only perpetuates the emphasis on property and lineage set up in The Castle of Otranto, but also metaphorically draws attention several times to the close relationship between horror and laughter in a way that suggests a metafictional awareness. For example, late in the novel, Schedoni and Ellena, guided by a peasant, arrive in Rome and pass close by the walls of the Inquisition building. Here they come across a fair where peasants ‘in their holiday cloaths’ are enjoying themselves: Here was a band of musicians, and there a group of dancers; on one spot the outré humour of a zanni provoked the never-failing laugh of the Italian rabble, in another the improvisatore, by the pathos of his story, and the persuasive sensibility of his strains, was holding the attention of his auditors, as in the bands of magic. Farther on was a stage raised for a display of fireworks, and near this a theatre, where a mimic opera, the ‘shadow of a shade’, was exhibiting, whence the roar of laughter, excited by the principal buffo within, mingled with

8 Gothic and the Comic Turn

the heterogeneous voices of the vendors of ice, macaroni, sherbet, and diavoloni, without.30 This episode clearly lends itself to a Bakhtinian reading in which the voices of the fair, or carnival, can be heard against the privileged voices of aristocratic authority that dominate the plot. Yet the passage can also be taken as a self-reflexive comment by the writer on her own blend of humour and horror, measured out rather differently from the heady and salacious mixture served up by Matthew Lewis in The Monk. Forced to stop near a stage ‘on which some persons grotesquely dressed, were performing’, Ellena and Schedoni witness a tragedy turned to comedy by the actors’ ‘strange gestures’ and ‘uncouth recitation’ (I, p. 274). Yet the narrator’s critical and seemingly authoritative dismissal of the entertainment is itself destabilized, since the peasant guide, entirely caught up in the story of Virginia which is being performed, and who is ignorant of Schedoni’s own recently abandoned attempt to murder Ellena (whom he at one point mistook for his daughter), calls out ‘Look! Signor, see! Signor, what a scoundrel! What a villain! See! He has murdered his own daughter!’ (I, p. 274). Here, Radcliffe, like Shakespeare, demonstrates that ‘the play’s the thing’; that, as in Hamlet, there is no clear dividing line in this text between ‘reality’ and the fictional representation of that ‘reality’; indeed, the latter might just be closer to ‘truth’ than the former. The scene also echoes the artisans’ appropriation of the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream – in which the energy, sincerity and the comedy of their performance both destabilize the Duke’s reassertion of generic boundaries and implicitly critique the hierarchical nature of his benign, albeit condescending, ‘royal’ attitude towards their labour. In The Italian, Schedoni’s earlier comment (on the peasant’s convoluted and – characteristically – unfinished tale of Old Marco) that ‘the narrative resembles a delirious dream, more than a reality’ (I, p. 284) applies also to this later scene with its mingling of nightmare, farce, coincidence, comedy and terror.31 There is perhaps a wry self-reflexivity here and even an implicit awareness that the Gothic (like melodrama and opera – and unlike naturalism or realism) presents, to use Eric Bentley’s words, the ‘expression of emotion in the pure histrionic form of dreams’.32 Its value in this context is that, in mingling emotional opposites such as mirth and terror, it reflects the psychic world more accurately than realist writing. Indeed, Philip Stevick suggests that the heightened, distorted and sometimes comic quality of Gothic texts arises from their likeness to dream narratives so that whilst the story might seem ridiculous, even amusing, the ‘coexistence of

Introduction 9

mythic seriousness, psychic authority and laughter’ within the Gothic text reflects the disturbing authenticity of insight gained through an unconscious process.33 In this sense, the player scene in The Italian offers both a corrective to the competing demand for realism in the new form of the novel and an early understanding that theatricality, comedy and melodrama are essential weapons in the Gothic text’s rejection of naturalism as a dominant mode for representing modern subjectivity. It is not surprising, then, to find that Dickens chose to preserve this form of creative eclecticism in an attempt to temper the claims of realism.34 This rejection of formal constraint and containment is also implicit in certain plot elements of The Italian, which hint that English politics cannot be kept separate from the outcome of the French Revolution;35 that religious commitment cannot be contained by the machine of the State, whatever form it takes (here, the Inquisition); that Ellena’s newly emerging subjectivity will not be contained by her marriage to Vivaldi (rather hysterically celebrated at the end of the novel and held in implicit tension with the utopian female community portrayed in Volume III, Chapter IV). Interestingly, Victor Sage, in his essay ‘Gothic Laughter: Farce and Horror in Five Texts’, cites Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian as ‘a very clear example of the peculiarly close relationship between horror and humour in the Gothic novel’ and goes on to present Dracula (1897) as ‘both a theory and an example of the peculiarly self-conscious complexities of humour which attach themselves to the gothic tradition’.36 Comparing the Gothic novel with the theatre, Sage argues that ‘the mistaken identity and the exaggerated, mechanical withholding of information, which is the driving force of stage farce, becomes in the context of the Gothic a metaphor for epistemological doubt and theological unease in the presence of death’.37 Whilst emphasizing slightly different aspects of the Gothic, critics such as Victor Sage and Philip Stevick seem to agree that the ‘surface’ element of Gothic fiction allows for an easy dialectic between the rational and the irrational, emotion and intellect, artificiality and authenticity and, above all, between horror and laughter. Indeed, it is the Gothic’s preoccupation with ‘surface’ that enables it so easily to embrace a comic as well as a tragic perspective, resulting in what Peter Berger has described as a ‘distinctive diagnosis of the world’.38 The comic turn is often located in the telling itself; as Frank Carson, the Irish comedian, used to remind his audience, ‘It’s the way I tell ’em.’ If the Gothic text demonstrates the horror attaching to such a shifting and unstable world, it also, in its comic dimension, celebrates the possibilities thereby released. This is perhaps most evident in the

10 Gothic and the Comic Turn

Gothic novel’s ludic qualities, particularly its interest in intertextuality and its playful concern with fakery. Walpole’s embrace of the fake can most obviously be seen in his Strawberry Hill home (his ‘Gothic villa’) in Twickenham and in the publication of The Castle of Otranto in 1764 as a true translation by ‘William Marshall, Gent.’ of a sixteenth-century Italian manuscript by ‘Onuphrio Muralto’, supposedly a ‘Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas of Otranto’. This element of fakery combines with the high degree of hybridity in Walpole’s text to produce a mode of writing that is not only at odds with realism and naturalism, but is also unusually self-reflexive and ludic. The fragmentation and stylization characteristic of melodrama often take the form in Gothic narratives of the framing tale or reference to a previous tale or lost text; for example, the myth of Prometheus and Milton’s Paradise Lost function in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as indicators of loss. Thus meaning, and with it authenticity, is constantly deferred to another textual source. In this sense the Gothic text can be seen as taking up a sceptical position towards authority and morality and as problematizing authenticity and legitimacy. Jerrold E. Hogle has suggested that the binary of ‘fakery’/ ‘authenticity’ that helps structure the Gothic novel is indicative of a specifically modern and fractured subjectivity. For Hogle, the modern condition finds expression in the Gothic text through fakery and simulacra.39 He argues that: The Gothic refaking of fakery becomes a major repository of the newest contradictions and anxieties in western life that most need to be abjected by those who face them so that middle-class westerners can keep constructing a distinct sense of identity. The progress of abjection in the Gothic is inseparable from the progress of the ghost of the counterfeit, particularly as that symbolic mode and the ideologies at war within it keep employing each other – and acting out abjections – both to conceal and to confront some of the basic conflicts in western culture.40 Hogle thus suggests that the rise of modernity, from the Renaissance onwards, has resulted in a crisis of identity in the western world. Inflecting this perception with his reading of Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death, Hogle goes on to argue that the stability of the feudal world was replaced by the social mobility and geographical displacements/relocations characteristic of a post-Renaissance world. The resulting psychological instability manifested itself in a breakdown between the sign and its referent: ‘Educated Europeans felt that they

Introduction 11

were leaving behind the age of the “obligatory sign”, the notion of signifiers as always referring to an ordained status in people and things where “assignation is absolute and there is no class mobility”. ’41 Thus both Brooks and Hogle see modernity as an age of fragmentation and breakdown in which the transcendent and the numinous are lost, or displaced from their original sources. For Brooks, however, melodrama offers an optimistic resolution to such breakdown in that it ‘can open up the angelic spheres as well as the demonic depths and can allay the threat of moral chaos’;42 that is, through melodrama we can learn to shoulder questions of ethics – instead of deferring them to God – so that the best in human behaviour is brought out as well as the worst. The Gothic, on the other hand, offers no such redemption, for either Brooks or Hogle. Indeed, for Hogle, the appeal of the Gothic is, as for Veeder, mainly therapeutic in that it allows us to explore ‘the fears and anxieties, even feelings of terror or horror’ which accompany the ‘cultural and personal quandaries’ resulting from modernity.43 The Gothic’s emphasis on fakery in the representation of extremes of feeling and experience inevitably invites the ludicrous excess of further layers of fakery in the form of parody. The Gothic text’s tendency to self-parody is well expressed by Chris Baldick in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales: ‘Many Gothic tales are already halfway to sending themselves up.’44 Given both the prominence of Romanticism in literary studies and the nineteenth-century construction of Romanticism as epitomized by the unique and individual nature of imaginative experience, it is not surprising that parody has, until relatively recently, been seen as derivative, lightweight and parasitical. It is only since the early 1990s that work by critics such as Linda Hutcheon, Margaret Rose and Simon Dentith has claimed some sophistication for parodic writing, arguing that, in foregrounding its own textuality, parody represents part of a complex cultural dialogue.45 Dentith, for example, cites Robert Phiddian (writing on Swift) with approval in this respect: all parody refunctions pre-existing text(s) and/or discourses, so that it can be said that these verbal structures are called to the readers’ minds and then placed under erasure. A necessary modification of the original idea is that we must allow the act of erasure to operate critically rather than as merely neutral cancellation of its object. Parodic erasure disfigures its pre-texts in various ways that seek to guide our re-evaluation or refiguration of them. It is dialogical and suggestive as well as negatively deconstructive, for it (at least potentially) can

12 Gothic and the Comic Turn

achieve controlled and meta-fictional commentary as well as purely arbitrary problematization.46 It is in this spirit that we approach parody when discussing Gothic and the Comic Turn – for most of the texts we examine in this book are either parodying previous Gothic texts or are more generally parodically appropriating Gothic tropes and devices. We thus offer our own definition of parody here as a literary mode that, while engaging with a target text or genre, exhibits a keen sense of the comic, an acute awareness of intertextuality and an engagement with the idea of metafiction. This is a deliberately generous and inclusive definition that differs, for example, from some postmodern definitions of parody that (perhaps in an attempt to elevate its cultural function) minimize or excise the importance of its comic dimension.47 We would suggest, furthermore, that it differs from travesty, pastiche and satire in that travesty reduces the target text to something ludicrous, pastiche ‘works by imitation rather than direct transformation’48 and satire does not necessarily engage with precursive texts. This is not to say that we see the cultural function of parody as limited and anodyne, since it is clear that it can function satirically in certain contexts. Indeed, parody’s comic engagement with precursive texts not only allows an irreverent response to target works and authors but also enables the writer, if he or she chooses, to engage critically with aspects of the contemporary world. It is thus essential to place parody within its historical and cultural moment. It is also clear that certain kinds of parody, in self-consciously foregrounding intertextuality, draw attention to writing itself, so that they offer both a reflection on fiction and the act of writing fictions. Thus parody can function as a key aspect of comic Gothic, not in the traditional sense of being parasitic upon an ‘original’ text, but because, through ‘repetition with critical difference’,49 it foregrounds the production of the modern subject through discourse. In this sense, parody can offer Gothic a comic turn. This turn frequently allows a fresh perspective on a changing world, one of accommodation rather than terrified apprehension. As the Gothic novel evolves in the twentieth century, this dialogic and metafictional strain inherent in Gothic writing becomes even more evident, particularly during the postmodern period. We suggested earlier that the comic turn in Gothic is not an aberration or a corruption of a ‘serious’ genre but rather a key aspect of Gothic’s essential hybridity. In the comic turn what we see is an exploitation of the stylized theatricality of the Gothic device, which is always teetering on the edge of self-parody. The result is not so much an abdication of

Introduction 13

the powers of horror as a process of turning them to creative purpose. This effect is different from the humour inadvertently evoked by the use of outworn devices that simply repeat, but that do so without ‘critical difference’. Comic Gothic turns, then, invite a conscious, self-reflexive engagement with the Gothic mode that sets up a different kind of contract between the reader and the text, offering a measure of detachment from scenes of pain and suffering that would be disturbing in a different Gothic context. Comedy has tended to be resistant to theorization and has down the centuries taken the role of poor relation to its grander sister tragedy. There is no companion to Aristotle’s Poetics, his only comments on comedy categorizing it as a baser form. Traditional studies of comedy in western culture emphasize the happy resolution, traditionally marriage – not death (although we are all too aware that this is often a shorthand symbolic and not a lived reality). In understanding the comic turn, it is important to recognize that comedy and the comic are not necessarily synonymous. The comic, what makes us laugh, is more elusive. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the emergence of the notion of incongruity that has remained influential in writing about the comic up until the present day.50 For example, William Hazlitt wrote in 1819: ‘The essence of the laughable then is the incongruous, the disconnecting one idea from another, or the jostling of one feeling against another.’51 We have only to look at the two meanings of the word ‘funny’ in English to see how the semantics of humour have been influenced by this line of thinking: ‘funny’/‘odd’ are words that can be interchangeable. At roughly the same time Hazlitt was writing on humour, Jean Paul Richter was trying to define the value of humour in his School for Aesthetics (1804). Richter offers an exposition of humour as the ‘inverse sublime’;52 whereas the Burkean sublime evokes terror, awe and fear, the ‘inverse sublime’ invites an ironic detachment from the world. ‘Humour’, writes Richter, ‘is a raving Socrates, as the ancients call Diogenes’.53 Both George Meredith and Henri Bergson contributed valuably during the nineteenth century to the development of ideas on laughter and comedy.54 Theoretical work on comedy by major twentieth-century critics is relatively sparse: Northrop Frye and C.L. Barber have written of the role of comedy in transforming disorder to order; Bakhtin relates comedy to carnival. In a different key, Freud’s theory of wit and the unconscious, first published in 1905, focuses on regression and aggression. If the Bakhtinian critical model of carnival allows humour only an exceptional reign in temporal terms, then the psychoanalytic model tends to recoup

14 Gothic and the Comic Turn

the comic into the psychopathology of everyday life rather than analysing it positively as a cultural manifestation of modernity. Even Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, which presents itself as dealing with the normal rather than with pathological psychology, finally turns on a model of regression (Freud’s argument being that jokes allow us to retrieve a euphoric state similar to that we experienced in childhood when, in fact, we had no need of humour as such). Thus, neither the Bakhtinian nor the Freudian psychoanalytic perspective constructs the comic as part of the ‘normal’. In contrast, the texts that we examine in Gothic and the Comic Turn recognize the complexity of the ‘normal’ and of the modern subject; they also demonstrate an acceptance of what it means to be part of a social world in which the traditional assumed link between signifier and signified no longer pertains. The comic is part of this complexity. As Fred Botting has noted: Laughter, activating a diabolical play that exceeds the attempt of sacred horror to expel or control it, is associated with the play of signs, narratives and interpretations, a play that is itself ambivalent in the way it is constructed as either rationally open and liberating or devilishly, anarchically irreverent.55 Or, we might add, mischievous and malicious. Important writers have, in the words of Arthur Koestler, ‘noted a component of malice, of debasement of the other fellow, and of aggressive-defensive selfassertion . . . in laughter – a tendency diametrically opposed to sympathy, helpfulness, and identification of the self with others’.56 This rather negative view of laughter takes us into the realm of black humour, where the affinity between laughter and death is exploited in dangerous ways. Peter Berger has observed that the traditional twinning of laughter and death indicates a certain logic: ‘Folly, which relativized and subverted all social order, finally foreshadowed death, which obliterates all social order once and for all.’57 As Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle have pointed out, many common phrases suggest that the link between death and laughter is more general and more intimate than the link between fear and hysteria. Indeed, as they note, laughter is sometimes represented, like death, as an annihilating force, as suggested by the idiomatic phrase ‘I nearly died laughing’ – or, we might add, ‘dead funny’.58 In Gothic and the Comic Turn we occasionally draw eclectically on theories of comedy and the comic that are contemporary with the novels we examine. Our aim here is to trace lightly the evolution of certain ideas at a particular moment in history as they manifest themselves across different sorts of

Introduction 15

writing; we draw, for example, on Richter when discussing the work of Edgeworth and Eaton Stannard Barrett. Finally, however, it seemed more important to keep a sharp eye on the historical, social and cultural contexts of the novels we discuss rather than subsume them into particular theories of the comic. What, then, do we mean by the ‘comic turn’ in this book? The Gothic text’s tendency to self-parody results in a variety of comic turns. We have suggested that it is perhaps best to think of Gothic writing as a spectrum that, at one end, produces horror-writing containing moments of comic hysteria or relief and, at the other, works in which there are clear signals that nothing is to be taken seriously. Gothic’s preoccupation with death places one kind of comic turn in a long tradition: that of the grin of the skull beneath the skin. This aligns with graveyard or gallows humour and is expressed graphically by one of Gothic’s famous characters, Van Helsing in Dracula, through the figure of ‘King Laugh’. At the other extreme we have the comic turn which consists entirely of spoof renderings of Gothic tropes and devices; these have enjoyed over recent years considerable popularity in the cinema and include The Addams Family, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Dracula: Undead and Loving It. Some of the texts we examine in this book are early precursors of such burlesques of the Gothic and were received as such at their time of publication. These texts execute a full turn so that they embrace the closure of comedy; examples include Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine (1913) and Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932). Such works offer the closure of classic festive comedy, as identified by Northrop Frye and C.L. Barber, and frequently end in a suitable marriage. At the same time, however, they throw the frames of social reference into doubt and make moral judgement appear a matter of relativity: it is in this sense that the comic can function as intellectually liberating, despite closures that appear to be conservative in restoring the individual to society. Where the full comic turn takes a satirical direction, closure gestures towards the more characteristically modern vision of the absurd. This is the comic turn that embraces nihilism; thus we enter the cul-de-sac of meaninglessness that can follow from the loss of transcendence. The fate of Evelyn Waugh’s Tony Last, who spends his last days reading Dickens to a madman in the heart of the Brazilian jungle, is an example of this kind of satiric comic turn, as is the abject final scene of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, which offers a grotesque parody of the closure of festive comedy. The comic turn in more ambiguous texts involves various kinds of grotesque. Wolfgang Kayser, in his influential book The Grotesque in Art and Literature, traces the evolution of the term

16 Gothic and the Comic Turn

‘grotesque’ from its origins in the Italian grotta (meaning cave) and designating ‘a certain ornamental style which came to light during late fifteenth-century excavations, first in Rome and then in other parts of Italy as well, and which turned out to constitute a hitherto unknown ancient form of ornamental painting’.59 He goes on to suggest that: By the word grottesco the Renaissance . . . which used it to designate a specific ornamental style suggested by antiquity, understood not only something playfully gay and carelessly fantastic, but also something ominous and sinister in the face of a world totally different from the familiar one – a world in which the realm of inanimate things is no longer separated from those of plants, animals, and human beings, and where the laws of statics, symmetry, and proportion are no longer valid.60 The loss of laws of symmetry and proportion, in relation to the human, quickly leads us to the grotesque body. In comic Gothic, however, this does not manifest itself in the horrific corporeality of a Frankenstein’s monster or an atavistic Hyde, but in the comically presented excess of flesh that constitutes Cherubina’s mother in The Heroine (1813) or the Dog-Woman in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989). The irreverent celebration of such excess tends to the licensing of transgression; these texts therefore lend themselves more easily to Bakhtin’s thoughts on carnival in Rabelais and His World and to Stallybrass and White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, than to Kayser’s emphasis on the grotesque as sinister, as Mary Russo points out.61 However, since the dawn of modernity, we have lived ‘in Gothic times’, to use Angela Carter’s phrase,62 and so to use theories of the carnivalesque to examine Gothic texts does not seem appropriate. For, as Umberto Eco has pointed out, Bakhtin’s claims for the potential revolutionary effects of carnival are false, in that the restrictions laid upon the acts of transgression (for a limited period only; in costume; as part of a highly stylized ritual) actually function to reinstate the importance of the law and social framework for the rest of the year: Carnival, in order to be enjoyed, requires that rules and rituals be parodied, and that these rules and rituals already be recognized and respected . . . Without a valid law to break, carnival is impossible . . . an everlasting carnival does not work: an entire year of ritual observance is needed in order to make the transgression enjoyable. Carnival can only exist as authorized transgression.63

Introduction 17

It is not this temporal framework that converts horror Gothic into comic Gothic. Rather, it is precisely because the Gothic is always liminal and poised on boundaries – and already halfway to sending itself up – that its characteristic features can easily be turned to comic effect. Thus its tendency to the sinister grotesque is easily converted to the comic flamboyance of the grotesque as excess, particularly during periods of rapid change resulting in a sense of instability and flux. This, in turn, means that the tropes and devices used within horror Gothic need continually to renew themselves in order to sustain their power to terrify. Frankenstein’s monster, as visualized in James Whale’s film version of 1931, no longer generates fear but has been domesticated and now adorns bubble-gum wrappers and crisp packets; the same is true of Christopher Lee’s performance of Dracula. Within modernity, monsters soon become domesticated through commodification and so monstrosity has to take a different form for each generation. Indeed, during the phase of late capitalism, it sometimes seems that while the Gothic monstrous has become reduced to a plastic toy, the truly monstrous is now accommodated within the quotidian: the super-surveillance of individuals through advances in information technology; the attack on New York’s Trade Centre in the twin towers; and cloning in the world of medical science. Yet Gothic’s dialogue with the progress of science has often shown a propensity for the comic turn, thus allowing not only the expression of fear and anxiety in the face of medical or scientific advances, but also a celebration of the possibilities thereby released. The comic turn in Gothic thus often indicates ambivalence in the face of the new. This has always been the case, as the Gothic representation of the automaton or the mechanical doll illustrates. On the one hand, the Gothic text often portrays the breakdown of the boundary between human and mechanical as sinister. Such a work will present the automaton as a thing that breaches ‘natural’ boundaries and is a threat to humanity. In Kayser’s words: The mechanical object is alienated by being brought to life, the human being by being deprived of it. Among the most persistent motifs of the grotesque we find human bodies reduced to puppets, marionettes, and automata, and their faces frozen into masks.64 On the other hand, however, in his essay ‘Laughter’, written in 1900, Bergson defines the ‘mechanical’ imitation of human behaviour as a source of humour, relating marionettes and ‘lifeless automata’ to a form of artifice that creates amusement65 – such amusement working culturally to protect us from spiritual death by mechanization. So it would seem

18 Gothic and the Comic Turn

that although, at one end of its spectrum, the Gothic presents us with a nightmare vision of automation, at the other end, the comic turn allows a representation of the automaton as ridiculously artificial, thus relativizing a threatening aspect of modernity. If, as Kayser concludes, ‘THE GROTESQUE IS THE ESTRANGED WORLD’ [sic],66 then one effect of the Gothic comic turn is to make such an ‘estranged’ world more bearable; for, in its irreverent dialogue with the uncanny and the supernatural, the comic turn in Gothic writing offers a fresh perspective on modernity, seeing it as hugely entertaining and productive as well as threatening. It would be possible, of course, to write a whole book on the comic Gothic turn in film alone; indeed, William Paul’s Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy makes a brave foray into this area.67 However, not being film experts, we have chosen in Gothic and the Comic Turn to focus on novels, some of them rather marginalized or previously regarded as merely ‘frivolous’, to use the term in our epigraph. They are all, however, ‘diverting’ and most of them show a healthy ambivalence and scepticism concerning the condition of life within modernity. When redeemed by laughter this scepticism translates into a mode of understanding that has a valuable cognitive function: it enhances our understanding of the modern consciousness in a particular manner. Indeed, as Berger suggests, ‘It is possible that modern consciousness, both in its pretheoretical form and then as it is theoretically explicated, produces a comic sensibility all its own.’68 Gothic and the Comic Turn seeks to explore a certain comic sensibility that defines itself in relation to what might first appear to be its opposite – Gothic horror – and to ask questions about the epistemological status of the counterworld created by the comic Gothic turn. Nicholas Royle has recently noted: Inextricably bound up with thoughts of home and dispossession, the homely and unhomely, property and alienation, the uncanny becomes, in the words of Anthony Vidler, ‘a metaphor for a fundamentally unlivable modern condition’.69 If this is the case, perhaps in subjecting the uncanny to various comic Gothic turns, novels such as those we examine here help to make the modern condition livable.

1 The Late Romantic Turn

Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent was published in 1800 and Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine in 1813, that is, after the Gothic novel had peaked in terms of its popularity during the 1790s and before those better-known parodies of Gothic fiction, Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey and Austen’s Northanger Abbey, which were published in 1818.1 Whereas The Heroine is a clear parody of the conventions of the popular Gothic novel, Castle Rackrent is perhaps a more subtle parody of the Gothic mode. Both Edgeworth and Barrett were commended by Austen, who wrote in a letter dated 2 March 1814: ‘I finished The Heroine last night and was very much amused by it . . . It diverted me exceedingly . . . I have torn through the third volume . . . I do not think it falls off. It is a delightful burlesque particularly on the Radcliffe style.’2 Belinda, Maria Edgeworth’s novel published in 1801, is of course linked with Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796) in Austen’s Northanger Abbey as one of those works ‘in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language’.3 But these two authors have more than Jane Austen’s praise in common. Before he became a playwright and a satirist, Eaton Stannard Barrett was a lawyer. Maria Edgeworth also knew much about the law, being well acquainted with the sort of legal struggles that define the plot of Castle Rackrent. Indeed, as several critics have pointed out, the novel’s primary source seems to be Edgeworth’s own Irish family history as recorded in The Black Book of Edgeworthstown,4 a work that charts the effect of the 19

20 Gothic and the Comic Turn

many legal struggles which took place within the Edgeworth family itself.5 In this chapter we shall argue that the way in which Castle Rackrent and The Heroine engage with the discourses of both the Gothic and the law signals some crucial shifts in the construction of gender, social class and national identity at the opening of the nineteenth century. In addition, both novels illustrate a particularly interesting cultural faultline in relation to the notion of the self within capitalism, that is, as a propertied body. It is no surprise, then, to find that legal vocabulary liberally peppers both works. It signals the increasing importance, we suggest, of legal discourse as one aspect of a distinctly modern subjectivity. Furthermore, what we see in Castle Rackrent and The Heroine is the opening up of a parodic space through the comic turn in their Gothic plots. This space allows an interestingly ambiguous portrayal of the resulting constraints and freedoms experienced by the modern subject in England and Ireland at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is curious that, despite its evocative title, Edgeworth’s novel has not been examined carefully in relation to its Gothic precedents, since it is clearly in parodic dialogue with Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. To begin with, it carries a preface that, like Walpole’s, presents the text as authentic. Walpole’s first preface to The Castle of Otranto claims that the novel is a translation of a document ‘found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England’ which deals with incidents from the ‘darkest ages of christianity’.6 While disavowing the supernatural elements of the tale, Walpole invites the reader to suspend disbelief since his characters lived at a time when such things seemed credible. Despite its fantastic elements, in the preface Walpole states that he ‘cannot but believe that the groundwork of the story is founded on truth’.7 Similarly, the preface to Castle Rackrent (written either by Edgeworth’s father or by Edgeworth herself, or by both of them8) presents the novel as an authentic first-person account, ‘A plain unvarnished tale’ narrated by ‘an illiterate old steward’.9 The author of the preface also goes to great pains, however, to create a distance between ‘the good sense and profoundly philosophic temper of the present times’ and these ‘“tales of other times”’, that is, of an older and more degenerate Ireland (CR, p. 63). There is signalled, then, a tension between the idea of Castle Rackrent as a fantastic tale and as a historical document (Marilyn Butler has recently argued that so many of the plot’s events and characters are based on the Black Book that much of Thady’s narration can be described as ‘not realism, so much as “the real”’10). The claim, however, that ‘the drunken Sir Patrick, the litigious Sir Murtagh, the fighting Sir Kit, and the slovenly Sir Condy, are characters which could no more be met with at present in Ireland, than Squire Western or Parson

The Late Romantic Turn 21

Trulliber in England’ is somewhat undermined by the problematization of the notion of ‘truth’ elsewhere in the preface, in particular Thady’s description of himself as ‘honest’ (CR, p. 65). The result is a sceptical appraisal of history as an uncertain form of truth-telling (evident also, of course, in both Northanger Abbey and The Heroine). Both Walpole and Edgeworth firmly relegate the fantastic elements of their tales to a time past whilst making claims for the continuing moral relevance of the stories themselves. In these prefaces, both authors are playing amusing games with their readers in order to evoke an ironic reappraisal of the boundaries between history, documentary, biography and fiction.11 In that sense, the novel itself is a clever joke, as Butler has assumed.12 Furthermore, certain elements of the plot of Castle Rackrent also evoke the plot of Walpole’s novel; behind Castle Rackrent there is the ghostly shadow of the Castle of Otranto. Both novels focus on the lineage of one family; both chart the fall of that house through four generations (and these four generations seem to represent, in both cases, a much longer historical span than a hundred years); both give us a woman literally confined to her room and rendered powerless (Hippolita and Sir Kit Rackrent’s Jewish wife); both see a ‘peasant’ inheriting the estate and its title (although, of course, Walpole’s peasant, Theodore, turns out to be no such thing in the end). It is thus rather odd that although Marilyn Butler tantalizingly links Edgeworth’s later work, Ennui (1809), with ‘remoter Gothic reverberations, as the symbolic rather than the particularized fall of a house and order’,13 she says nothing about Edgeworth’s parodic appropriation of certain Gothic tropes and devices in Castle Rackrent. Brian Hollingworth comments that ‘this innocent text is deliberately linked to the sophisticated gothic tradition of The Castle of Otranto’,14 but he does little more than note its ambiguity in this respect. Suggesting that the story of the trapped wife has its serious counterpart in a social reality, and that Judy M’Quirk represents Ireland, neglected and abused by a masculine Britain, he concludes that ‘Castle Rackrent denies the imagined grotesqueries of the Gothic novel only to establish them more firmly in the “real” social and political world’.15 Edgeworth, however, does not deny ‘the imagined grotesqueries of the Gothic novel’: rather, she renders them in comic vein. The romantic demesnes of medieval Italy become transmuted into family estates with memorable names such as Ballynagrotty and New Town Tullyhog (CR, p. 66), while the name of the Rackrent bog, Allyballycarricko’shaughlin, reduces Sir Kit Rackrent’s wife to hysterics: ‘she fell to laughing like one out of their right mind, and made me say the name of the bog over for her to get it by heart’ (CR, p. 78).16 The oppressive and dominating

22 Gothic and the Comic Turn

presence of the castle in Walpole’s tale is here replaced by a derelict ancestral home, where extra guests are put up ‘in the chicken-house’ (CR, p. 67) and where everyone lives ‘from hand to mouth’ (CR, p. 94). By the end of the tale, broken window-panes are being stopped up with an old pillowcase and an old stage curtain because there is no money to pay a glazier. Poverty even results in a dearth of candles (CR, p. 94), an essential ingredient of any Gothic plot, as readers of Ann Radcliffe will know. The extreme difference between the benign patriarch (Alfonso the Good, or Radcliffe’s Vivaldi, for example) and his wicked counterpart (Manfred, Count of Otranto or Schedoni) that one finds in classic Gothic texts is here collapsed into a series of ineffectual and comic male figures. The first Rackrent lord, Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin, is notable mainly for his short neck and ‘for the largest pimple on his nose’ and for having invented raspberry whiskey (CR, p. 67). His death results from ‘a sort of fit’, brought on by drinking too much claret. The new heir, Sir Murtagh Rackrent, is a mean lawyer, whose presence is somewhat eclipsed by that of his wife, a woman who energetically exploits even the poor children in her own charity school. Her need to have the last word in a quarrel about an abatement provokes her husband’s temper such that he bursts a blood vessel and ‘all the law in the land could do nothing in that case’ (CR, p. 72). The next incumbent, Sir Kit Rackrent, Sir Murtagh’s younger brother, is a ‘young dashing officer’ (CR, p. 72), whose financial carelessness and irresponsibility lead him into debt. As a remedy for this, he marries a rich Jewess but her fortune evades him, despite his locking her in ‘the barrack room’ (a large guest room) for seven years in order to break her spirit – an episode in the novel rather chillingly based on the real incarceration in the 1760s of Lady Cathcart who lived, with her husband, in a Catholic household four miles north of Edgeworthstown.17 Sir Kit’s philandering with other women results in a series of duels with their brothers, the second of whom has a wooden leg, ‘and their place of meeting by appointment being a new ploughed field, the wooden-leg man stuck fast in it’ (CR, p. 81). In his last duel, however, having hit ‘the tooth pick out of his adversary’s finger and thumb, he received a ball in a vital part, and was brought home, in a little better than an hour after the affair, speechless on a hand-barrow, to my lady’ (CR, p. 81). At Sir Kit’s death, the estate is taken over by Sir Connolly (Condy) Rackrent, a relative from a distant and impoverished branch of the family who has been ‘bred to the bar’ (CR, p. 85). An extravagant and warm-hearted philanderer, he has already used the estate as credit against his name and soon marries Miss Isabella Moneygawl in an effort to shore up his financial state, abandoning his mistress, Judy M’Quirk. Vain, affected and given to ‘tantarums’ (CR, p. 93), Isabella is as

The Late Romantic Turn 23

irresponsible as her new husband, and they soon get through the ‘few thousands’ she had brought with her to the marriage. Elected to parliament, Sir Condy is nevertheless unable to solve the problem of his insolvency, finally selling his estate to Jason, Thady’s son, who has trained as an attorney. Wishing to hear what people would say about him after his demise, Sir Condy feigns death, although the charade becomes too much for him at one point: standing amongst them that were near the bed, but not thinking at all of the dead, I was started by the sound of my master’s voice from under the great coats that had been thrown all at top, and I went close up, no one noticing. ‘Thady’, says he, ‘I’ve had enough of this; I’m smothering, and can’t hear a word of all they’re saying of the deceased’. ‘God bless you, and lie still and quiet’, says I, ‘a bit longer, for my sister’s afraid of ghosts, and would die on the spot with fright, was she to see you come to life all of a sudden this way without the least preparation’. (CR, p. 112) Apart from Thady’s references to ‘a fairy-mount’ (which carries a lengthy gloss) and the Banshee (CR, p. 71), this is the closest we come to the supernatural in Castle Rackrent.18 In fact, Sir Condy dies of a fever brought on by drinking a great horn full of punch in a wager for a thousand guineas. This is the Fall of the House of O’Shaughlin by Walpole out of Fielding: Gothic farce of a highly entertaining nature. Even the women who marry into this unfortunate family manage to avoid a truly Gothic fate. They emerge from their luckless unions none the worse – and, in some cases, better off than before. Sir Murtagh Rackrent’s wife, or Lady Skinflint as Thady calls her, has ‘a fine jointure settled upon her’ (CR, p. 72) and, upon her husband’s death, leaves for Dublin, making sure that ‘all the feather-beds . . . blankets and household linen, down to very knife cloths . . . all . . . lawfully paid for out of her own money’ (CR, p. 72) have been sent on before her. Sir Kit Rackrent’s unlucky Jewish wife, confined to the barrack room for seven years, manages to keep hold of her own income and her diamond cross, despite the fact that her husband married her for her jewels and her money. Upon Sir Kit’s death, she is released from her domestic prison by Jason and leaves for England, having ‘got surprisingly well after my master’s decease’, in Thady’s words (CR, p. 82). Wishing to show his goodwill and affection, Sir Condy settles ‘a clear five hundred a year jointure off the estate afore any of my debts are paid’ on his wife who is about to leave him (CR, p. 105). Judy M’Quirk is also on the look out for herself and is well aware that economic independence brings

24 Gothic and the Comic Turn

autonomy for women. She is certainly not seduced by the idea of a title: ‘why, what signifies it to be my lady Rackrent, and no castle?’ (CR, p. 118). As Kathryn Kirkpatrick notes, these women benefit from a system in flux as, indeed, does Jason Quirk: To the paradigm of the ineffectual Anglo-Irish landlord bested by a wife is added the avenging native Irish son in the last half of Castle Rackrent. Jason Quirk embraces laissez-faire capitalism with a vengeance: he trains as a lawyer so as to beat Protestant land-grabbers at their own game . . . Jason abandons the ties of Catholic custom and inserts himself into an emerging capitalist patriarchy. Although colonized by race and class, Jason is successful at securing land as the Rackrent women are not: he uses Protestant law to displace the last Anglo-Irish patriarch and gain the Rackrent estate. . . . Locating the struggle for legitimate ownership in a contested written text, Castle Rackrent ends where The Black Book of Edgeworthstown begins, by exposing the right to property as a constructed fiction.19 However, the ability of Jason Quirk and the Rackrent wives to survive and even prosper in such times is due in large part to the transitional nature of Irish society, and the law that governed it, during the eighteenth century. Set ‘before the year 1782’ (title page), the novel’s action takes place before the Dependency of Ireland Act (1782); this Act repealed the statute of 1719, which had subordinated the Irish Parliament to Westminster. The Irish House of Lords did not recover its appellate jurisdiction until 1782,20 a date which for Edgeworth clearly signified an important turning point for Ireland. During the eighteenth century, Irish law became increasingly fluid due to a number of powerful cultural and political changes, including colonization by the English and changes in class structure. As Kirkpatrick notes: ‘Satirizing four generations of Rackrent heirs, Edgeworth expertly depicts a society in confused transition between a feudal culture based on Catholic custom and a capitalist marketplace formed by Protestant law’.21 Indeed, Protestant law, in the service of capitalism and English nationalism, created many legal obstacles to prevent Catholics from acquiring land and in order to transfer property rights from Catholics to Protestants. This is why, of course, Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin changes his surname to Rackrent, his choice of name (which suggests an extortionate landlord) indicating a practice which would become common in Ireland within this transitional period. As Michael Neill notes:

The Late Romantic Turn 25

Sir Patrick’s stratagem clearly echoes those changes of religious profession whereby Catholic heirs evaded the Penal Laws that would otherwise have blocked their rights of inheritance; something similar is surely intended by the shifty nomenclature of Thady and his son, who appear to have abandoned the incriminating ‘Mac’ that once announced their allegiance.22 The fact that so much land passed to Protestant English absentee landlords in eighteenth-century Ireland led to the rise of the ‘middleman’, or ‘agent’ as Edgeworth calls him. Wylie notes that these agents ‘had one abiding aim: to make as much profit out of the land by every means possible (so long as it appeared legal)’. The result was a ‘widespread subdivision of the large estates by means of grants and sub-grants conferring estates and interests in the land less than freehold’.23 This, of course, is precisely the fate of Castle Rackrent. Due to Sir Kit’s recklessness and Sir Condy’s fecklessness, the estate becomes vulnerable. A ‘stranger man’ (CR, p. 96) (in fact, an agent) buys up all Sir Condy’s debts and then takes out ‘a custodiam on all the denominations and sub-denominations, and every carton and half carton upon the estate’ (CR, p. 98) – a ‘custodiam’ being, as Butler notes, a term in Irish law for a three-year grant of Crown lands made by the Exchequer to the lessee (CR, p. 350). Eventually, of course, Jason outwits all the agents and excisemen, gaining the lands on which his father has been the retainer for so many years. In this novel the devious machinations of the colonized (the Catholic Irish) triumph over the irresponsibility of the colonizer (the Protestant Anglo-Irish) and the working-class triumphs (through wit, education and the law) over the landed gentry. This is in stark contrast to The Castle of Otranto, the plot of which, as E.J. Clery notes, reflects a growing tension between a feudal society in which property acts as a marker of aristrocratic hegemony and a society in which individual autonomy – including the right to acquire property – is becoming increasingly important for the healthy growth of the capitalist system. English law itself was indeed changed to preserve the former: The device of ‘strict settlement’ was introduced to prevent heirs selling off portions of their estate to suit their own interests. The preservation of property was all. As Henry Home writes of the law of entail, it enabled ‘every land-proprietor to fetter his estate for ever; to tyrannize over his heirs’; property becomes ‘in effect a mortmain’, literally speaking the dead hand of the past weighing on the present.24

26 Gothic and the Comic Turn

As Clery notes, the dead hand of the law literally appears as the giant hand on the staircase in Walpole’s novel; in Edgeworth’s novel there is no such ghostly intrusion, only the rumour of supernatural things past. Comic Gothic does not allow death by the hand of mortmain; instead, it celebrates flux. This flux also results in the erosion of gender boundaries. As Kirkpatrick observes, we see Lady Murtagh accepting money and goods from tenants in exchange for promising ‘to speak for them to Sir Murtagh about abatements and renewals’ (CR, p. 71); she thus ‘crosses gender boundaries and adopts the laissez-faire competitive behaviour usually reserved for men under rule of law’. More generally, the women in the text take the law into their own hands when it suits them and they ignore it when it does not.25 As such, the novel anticipates the plot of Ennui, published in 1809, which features three strong women who, as Butler notes, are all authority-figures and who, ‘under different rules of legitimacy’, stand ‘for a hybrid Ireland’.26 The importance of the law in Castle Rackrent and its metonymic function as suggestive of vast social and political change are indicated by the way in which its discourse permeates the text. Compared with the language of religion, which is almost absent from the novel, the density of legal terminology is striking. On a rough count, legal words mentioned more than three times in the novel include the following: estate (14); law (27); debt (10); rent (13); tenants (14); leases (11); landlord (5); jointure (7); agent (18); interest (7); custodiam (6) and land (8). Even more significant, perhaps, are the legal connotations of the name Quirk as explored by Michael Neill, especially the fact that the word was ‘often associated with the sleight-of-tongue proverbially attributed to the legal profession’.27 This is a novel about law, land and money and the way in which the relationship between these three things is inflected in the transition from one social system to another. Thus the riddle of Thady (is he ‘honest’ or is he devious?) that has perplexed so many readers is a deliberate tease on Edgeworth’s part. The text provides enough to justify both readings, although currently critics write in favour of the latter.28 Thus we suggest that, instead of trying to place Thady as either victim or villain, we should see him as a Janus figure, as someone who has lived through a time of radical social and political change, and who looks backwards as well as forwards.29 He nostalgically and noisily laments the passing of an aristocratic hegemony while silently celebrating the rise of the individual, ratified by the law, within Protestant capitalism (who happens, luckily in this case, to be his son). The fact that the two perspectives exist in mutual contradiction renders him both despicably hypocritical and immensely shrewd. He is,

The Late Romantic Turn 27

however, the quintessential comic Gothic narrator: his very equivocation reflects the fact that the text poises itself on the cusp of change from one system to another. There is a doubleness to Thady, signified by his very name,30 that anticipates the doppelgänger figure of nineteenthcentury Gothic fiction. This splitting is echoed elsewhere in the text, as Susan Glover points out, in ‘a divided title, a divided subtitle, a divided editorial frame, a divided central narrative, two narrators, two families each with two names (O’Shaughlin-Rackrent and M’Quirk-Quirk), two national voices, two religions, and two narrative time frames’.31 The agony of a fragmented subjectivity that such splitting can suggest, however, is here rendered comical via casuistry, ambiguity and ironic complexity. In what is a complete comic turn, the intense anxiety of such a condition is defused in order to express the potential liberations inherent in the multiplicity of self. It does not, however, sentimentalize them. Changes in the law, as well as his own cunning, enable the unlikeable Jason to acquire the estate and thereby to challenge feudal convention and tradition. However, despite the fecklessness of the Rackrent lords, the deviousness of Jason and his father does not allow the reader to celebrate unreservedly their clever opportunism. Published during the reign of terror that followed the French Revolution and in the same year as the Act of Union, Castle Rackrent signals a stage of modernity that will develop its own particular forms of brutality as well as bringing new types of liberation. In the spirit of Edgeworth’s Irish tales, then, the novel exhibits what Butler has described as ‘an element of virtually postmodern scepticism about the possibility of a stable individual identity’32 at such a moment of history. It also sets up an agenda for the nineteenth-century novel that will continue to merge the tropes and devices of various fictional forms in order to produce a rich and hybrid writing that cannot be constrained by the term ‘realism’. Published in 1813, Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine: Or Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader quite clearly draws parodically on the content and conventions of other texts as a way of creating its comic effects. More specifically, the contrivances and contraptions of Gothic novels are much in evidence as the eponymous heroine turns her back on a humdrum rural existence and embarks upon a set of picaresque adventures. Many of the themes and tropes of eighteenth-century Gothic writing – for example, the restoration of lineage and property, the moving picture, the old servant who knows a family secret, the Gothic building – are parodied in Barrett’s novel. However, this aspect of The Heroine has not always been appreciated by its editors. For example, in his introduction to the 1909 edition of Barrett’s novel, Walter

28 Gothic and the Comic Turn

Raleigh writes rather disparagingly of it; while acknowledging that certain writers transcend their own intention to write parody, he states that in Barrett’s case ‘it cannot be claimed that he proved superior to the task which he undertook’.33 While Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) has long been enjoyed as an entertaining engagement with the Gothic (first as a burlesque and more recently as a subtle appropriation of Gothic conventions for the purpose of exploring dark but mundane truths34), Barrett’s The Heroine has fallen into obscurity. Austen’s famous novel begins with the words, ‘No one who had seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine’.35 Barrett’s ‘heroine’, Cherry Wilkinson, is a similarly unlikely candidate for the role; like Catherine Morland, she is a novel-reader but one who wilfully sets out to adopt an identity modelled on the fictional heroines she has encountered; she thus perfectly illustrates the novel’s epigraph, ‘L’Histoire d’une femme est toujours un Roman’. The result is that the story of Cherry’s adventures, like those of Catherine Morland, bears a parodic relationship to the novels of her time. The Heroine is a novel in the form of letters from a young woman to her governess. Cherry is the rosy-cheeked daughter of Gregory Wilkinson, a farmer; her head turned by her reading of Gothic and sentimental literature, she misconstrues a ‘frightful fragment’ (H, p. 18) of a copy of a lease as proof that she is descended from the Willoughbys of nearby Gwyn Castle. Changing her name to Cherubina de Willoughby, she therefore leaves home (thereby causing her father great distress) and sets off to claim her inheritance on a journey which initially takes her, a country innocent, into the less-than-respectable echelons of London society and into the company of disreputable theatre folk. Various masquerades and deceptions on the part of her new companions ensue, including one of them presenting himself, in cod middle English, as Wylome Eftsoones, an ‘ancient and loyal vassal’ (H, p. 113) of the Willoughby family, and thus furthering Cherry’s delusions of nobility. Followed by a train of fortune-seekers and by genuine admirers, she fails in her aim to ‘reclaim’ Gwyn Castle, but does manage to ‘capture’ Monkton Castle, which is not much more than a ruin and which (strongly influenced by her reading) she decks out as a Gothic abode. In short, she acts out the role of a heroine. After many adventures, she is brought to her senses, reunited with her father and is ‘re-educated’ by an ‘exemplary pastor’ (H, p. 292) and by one Robert Stuart. The latter, formerly her father’s ward and a sensible man of property, eventually rewards her ‘conversion’ back to reality with a proposal of marriage.

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Modern-day readers find the witty one-liners and what E.J. Clery and Robert Miles have described as ‘the delirious silliness’ of Cherry’s adventures very entertaining;36 it was also greatly admired as a comic work by Barrett’s contemporaries. Hugely popular in the decade after it was published, The Heroine has been undeservedly out of print since 1927. It was described in The Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland (1816) as ‘not inferior in wit and humour to Tristram Shandy, and in point of plot and interest infinitely beyond Don Quixote’.37 An essay on The Heroine, published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835 (possibly written by Edgar Allan Poe), describes Barrett’s novel as never having had ‘attracted half that notice on the part of the critical press, which is undoubtedly its due’.38 Devendra Varma, writing in the mid-twentieth century, claims to admire the novel but almost damns it with faint praise by describing it as ‘perhaps the best work of the reactionary school’.39 It would seem, then, that nineteenth-century readers were more open to the delights of The Heroine than most twentieth-century critics, who tended to dismiss it as parasitic and inferior. However, for a reader schooled in post-modern irony, The Heroine can present itself as a work that moves skilfully between the discourses of Romanticism, sensibility and the Gothic in order to produce a witty and penetrating analysis of the literature and culture of its time. In so doing, it foregrounds the problematic nature of the relationship between the text and the reader, the fictional and the ‘real’, and the interchange between literary constructs and social behaviour. It is easy to see, though, how The Heroine has been read as a conservative or even reactionary text. It is clear, even from our brief plot description, that it can be placed in the tradition of novels such as Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote or The Adventures of Arabella (1752), which burlesque the romance. Lennox’s novel manifests a very English anxiety about the romance genre and its effects on female readers, for eighteenth-century middle-class English women were, as Margaret Anne Doody has noted, to ‘have neither history nor adventures’ if they were to remain proper ladies.40 Despite Jane Austen’s sophisticated exploration of the relationship between romance and the ‘real’ world in Northanger Abbey, such ideas about female decorum influenced reader reception of such texts right into the mid-twentieth century. As late as 1967 the aim of Lennox’s novel was being described as a ‘desire to ridicule the French heroic romances, and to point out their potentially harmful effects on the minds of inexperienced readers’.41 The reception of The Heroine has been similarly influenced, with Walter Raleigh describing the novel in

30 Gothic and the Comic Turn

his 1909 introduction as simply reflecting the ‘middle-class code of (Barrett’s) own time’ and as a work which was written to warn the heroine ‘against the extravagances that so easily beset her’.42 The critic here aligns himself with the mentoring male in such novels in that he focuses on what is seen as a female tendency to be deluded by romance fictions, thereby emphasizing his own sophistication and worldliness. The fact that the author of The Heroine was a man has provided further confirmation, for many readers, that the novel set out to educate silly women readers into a more ‘mature’ state of mind. In similar vein, several late twentieth-century readings of The Heroine present, with varying degrees of sophistication, both the work and its author as reactionary. Paul Lewis, whilst giving credit to the power of the novel’s humour, sees ‘beneath the apparently harmless, even delightful, literary thesis an unquestioning faith in patriarchy and repression’.43 Gary Kelly, whilst grounding the novel far more securely in contemporary culture and politics than Lewis, nevertheless sees it as the product of historical forces which were ‘pressing hard for professionalization and the conservative values of emergent professional middle-class ideology’.44 Indeed, Gary Kelly’s description of Barrett as ‘a Tory professional man and . . . an anti-Whig, Anti-Jacobin, antiSentimentalist, antifeminist writer’ underpins his reading of The Heroine as part of the institutionalization of a ‘professional middle-class culture and hegemony’ which wished to see the middle-class woman safely constrained within the home.45 Jacqueline Howard refuses to find any subtlety in the novel, arguing that Barrett ‘trivializes’ Cherry ‘to such a degree that she becomes a tedious character with whom we can have little sympathy’; she also claims that in The Heroine ‘(w)e find none of the ambiguity which Hutcheon sees as characteristic of the ironic inversion constituting parody’.46 Both Lewis and Howard see Barrett’s novel as superficial, fit to be considered as only frivolous entertainment. For example, Lewis states: In the hands of sophisticated writers (for example, Godwin, Brown, Poe, Hogg, Hawthorne, Melville, James and others), mystery has the potential for raising important theological, epistemological, psychological, and social questions . . . (whereas) . . . Barrett misses the very human sense of doubt and fear, the adventurous exploration of the fantastic at the center of the Gothic.47 In similar vein, Howard argues that Cherry’s ‘“slavish adherence” to purely literary conventions so thoroughly pre-empts any raising of the

The Late Romantic Turn 31

epistemological, psychological, and theological questions found in the Gothic that it trivializes the genre’.48 This approach ignores the fact that Cherry’s ‘slavish adherence’ to literary conventions subjects them to a comic turn that, in opening up a parodic space, makes possible a playful interrogation of their ideological underpinning. We would suggest, instead, that as well as illustrating ‘with unusual clarity the interrelationship of social, cultural, and political issues during the Romantic social and cultural revolution’,49 The Heroine can also be read as comically negotiating contemporary anxieties – for example, those concerning women and property – in such a way as to raise serious questions in the mind of the reader. In choosing parody as his comic vehicle, Barrett, we argue, embraces what Linda Hutcheon sees as one of its key functions: I see parody as operating as a method of inscribing continuity while permitting critical distance. It can indeed function as a conservative force in both retaining and mocking other aesthetic forms; but it is also capable of transformative power in creating new syntheses, as the Russian formalists argued.50 In similar spirit, Glen Cavaliero has recently suggested that: Even when the parody is largely celebratory . . . it is also purposeful, its target the tyranny of the monolith, its aim to be liberating and remedial. Both the strength and the weakness of any literary artefact can be illuminated by a parody . . .51 The Heroine certainly retains and mocks ‘other aesthetic forms’ in that it is an extremely self-conscious text addressed to a well-read reader. The Glossary appended by Michael Sadleir to the 1927 edition lists over thirty novels referred to in the text, including: Mrs. Roche’s Children of the Abbey, Fanny Burney’s Cecilia and Evelina; Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian; Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison; Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse; Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and Corinne by Madame de Staël.52 As Gary Kelly points out, it also draws on ‘Burke’s notoriously ornate style in his Reflections on the Revolution in France . . . speeches by Bonaparte, and a speech by the reformer Sir Francis Burdett to the electors of Westminster in 1812.’53 Barrett’s text thus rhetorically dissolves the apparent distinction between the worlds of politics and popular fiction. Such a dense fabric of intertextual reference presupposes that

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the author and the reader share a legacy of cultural codes and experience. Moreover, the ‘rules’ of both sentimental and Gothic writing are frequently made fun of by the author in an acutely self-reflexive manner. For example, the heroine points out early in the text to one of her admirers that ‘whoever rescues me now, you know, is destined to marry me hereafter. That is the rule’ (H, p. 37); a few pages later she remarks to another character: ‘I give you my word I will pay you at the dénouement when all the other characters come to be provided for . . .’ (H, p. 41). Sometimes this baring of the device results in strangely dislocating moments, as when Cherubina comments that ‘Men who converse with a heroine, should talk for the press, or they will cut but a silly figure in her memoirs’ (H, p. 173). But exposure of the rigidity of the rules of fiction is also used to make the reader query the rigidity of other discourses, such as history, with its apparent objectivity. In a passage which is remarkably consonant in tone with the more famous section in Austen’s Northanger Abbey, in which Catherine Morland queries history as an objective narrative since it contains ‘hardly any women at all’,54 Cherubina debates the relative merits of history and fiction with a fellow traveller: ‘novels must be much more true than histories, because historians often contradict each other, but novelists never do.’ ‘Yet do not novelists contradict themselves?’ said he. ‘Certainly’, replied I, ‘and there lies the surest proof of their veracity. For as human actions are always contradicting themselves, so those books which faithfully relate them must do the same.’ ‘Admirable!’ exclaimed he. ‘And yet what proof have we that such personages as Schedoni, Vivaldi, Camilla, or Cecilia ever existed?’ ‘And what proof have we’, cried I, ‘that such personages as Alfred the Great, Henry the Fifth, Elfrida, or Mary Queen of Scots, ever existed?’ (H, p. 29) Against the ‘common-sense’ reading of the novel, then, which sees the dénouement as the displacement of fanciful fictions by the concerns of the ‘real’ world, we are encouraged by The Heroine to see life and fiction, history and novels, and ‘truth’ and fantasy as not, in fact, easily separable but as part of one continuum. As Margaret Anne Doody notes of The Female Quixote’s similar self-reflexiveness, ‘To control modes of narration... is to control the world.’55 Read from a feminist viewpoint, of course, this self-conscious appropriation of narrative control by Cherry/Cherubina has interesting

The Late Romantic Turn 33

implications. In a preface entitled ‘The Heroine to the Reader’, Barrett introduces the idea of a parallel imaginary universe created through the act of writing: Know, that the moment a mortal manuscript is written out in a legible hand, and the word End or Finis annexed thereto, whatever characters happen to be sketched in it (whether imaginary, biographical, or historical) acquire the quality of creating and effusing a sentient soul or spirit, which instantly takes flight, and ascends through the regions or air, till it arrives at the MOON; where it is then embodied, and becomes a living creature; the precise counterpart, in mind and person of its literary prototype. (H, p. 2) We are alerted here to the Quixotic notion that an alternative world of romance or fantasy can (like modern science fiction) offer the means whereby the values of this world can be held open to question; that there is, in Jonathan Lamb’s words, ‘a particular sort of integrity which is defined by literary activity’.56 Similarly, Cherry Wilkinson’s deliberate adoption of another persona, the alter ego of Cherubina de Willoughby, can be seen as the creation of a benign doppelgänger which allows the heroine a freedom and power undreamt of in contemporary conduct books or novels of sensibility. The monstrous doppelgänger, which was to become a familiar figure in later Gothic texts of the nineteenth century as a mode of expressing fear of the abject and an anxiety concerning split subjectivity, is allowed in this comic Gothic text a humorous excess within which notions of liberty and the testing of conventional boundaries can be explored. Thus, when quizzed by Cherubina as to how romances and novels ‘contaminate the mind’, a female fellow-traveller answers tartly: ‘by teaching little misses to go gadding, Mem, and to be fond of the men, Mem, and of spangled muslin, Mem’ (H, p. 28). Searching for freedom and adventure, Cherubina decides to play the part of the heroine, since: The heroine may permit an amorous arm around her waist, disobey her parents, and make assignations, yet be described as the most prudent of human creatures; but the mere Miss must abide by the regular rules of modesty, decorum and filial obedience. In a word, as different classes have distinct privileges, it appears to me, from what I know of the law national, and the law romantic, that the heroine’s prerogative is similar to the King’s; and that she, like him, can do no wrong. (H, p. 112)

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In the nod to Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, there is a sharp recognition here that the discourses of the law, class and gender situate the subject and constrain her freedoms as firmly as any set of iron bars. And indeed, as a ‘heroine’, Cherubina enjoys powers and privileges only dreamt of by Cherry. Not only does she command a train of followers and freely make numerous assignations but she also takes and reigns over her own Gothic space, Monkton Castle (even if this is no more than a draughty ruin). Whilst inviting its readers to laugh at such excesses of liberty and their dire consequences, the novel nevertheless reminds us that the alternative ‘reality’ lies in shades of the bourgeois household closing in on the growing girl.57 ‘You know that a mere home is my horror’, says Cherubina (H, p. 98). At the same time, however, The Heroine undermines this escape fantasy. For we finally see the independent Cherubina recuperated into a Cherry who marries her father’s choice of a well-educated middle-class man of property; the novel’s implicit critique of the old aristocratic way of life is thereby reaffirmed and it reinforces the model of middle-class domesticity offered by early nineteenth-century conduct books.58 The Heroine thus has it both ways: it inscribes the values of the aspiring middle class (as Kelly argues) but simultaneously exposes the constraints they impose on the imaginative young woman. As Barrett notes in his preface to The Heroine, making ‘the world laugh . . . is the gravest occupation an author can chuse’ (H, p. 6). The novel does not offer a resolution in the form of a compromise between aristocratic ideals and the emergent middle-class management of women, as Barrett’s tart rewriting of Fanny Burney’s hugely popular Evelina reveals. Cherubina hears from one of her London companions masquerading as the fictional character, Sir Charles Grandison, that Lord Orville and his Evelina are not happily married: ‘“Happy!” cried he, laughing. “Have you really never heard of their notorious miffs? Why it was but yesterday that she flogged him with a boiled leg of mutton, because he had sent home no turnips” ’ (H, p. 271). We could, of course, see this as evidence of Barrett’s conservatism and of his anti-feminist attitude towards women writers such as Burney and Jacobin thinkers such as Wollstonecraft. An alternative way of reading it, however, is to see it as indicative of the cultural ambivalence characteristic of parody as a genre. Here we should bear in mind Hutcheon’s premise that parody is ‘fundamentally double and divided’ and that ‘its ambivalence stems from the dual drives of conservative and revolutionary forces that are inherent in its nature as authorized transgression’.59

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In this respect, the representation of the female body in Barrett’s novel, which clearly relates to the legacy of Romanticism and the cult of sensibility, is particularly interesting. The way in which heroines react to moments of crisis in, say, Ann Radcliffe’s works – by fainting, blushing or falling into silence – derives, as Daniel Cottom has pointed out, from a body language specific to notions of femininity and sensibility current from the mid-eighteenth century.60 Not surprisingly, then, Cherubina defines a heroine in the following terms: A heroine is a young lady, rather taller than usual, and often an orphan; at all events, possessed of the finest eyes in the world. . . . She blushes to the tips of her fingers, and when other girls would laugh, she faints. Besides, she has tears, sighs, and halfsighs, at command; lives a month on a mouthful and is addicted to the pale consumption . . . to be thin, innocent, and lyrical; to bind and unbind her hair; in a word, to be the most miserable creature that ever augmented a brook with tears, these, my friend, are the glories of a heroine. (H, pp. 39, 40) The powerful construct within Western culture which equates femininity with physical delicacy and emotional susceptibility is here exposed as fiction rather than truth, as ‘the glories of a heroine’. But the connection between body image and femininity is further quizzed when Cherubina meets someone claiming to be her long-lost mother who, she learns, has been confined, in true Gothic spirit, within a subterranean vault of a villa. In a coup de grâce, it is revealed at the end of the novel that this has been a fake mother and indeed a fake woman: it was Lady Gwyn’s nephew, put up to the charade by his aunt who had taken to excess Robert Stuart’s injunction to humour Cherry’s ‘caprices’. In a passage reminiscent of several others in Radcliffe’s novels, the heroine is conducted at midnight by two strange men to her ‘mother’, whom she expects to find in a state of starvation ‘stretched on a mattress of straw’ (H, p. 152). Instead, she finds her supposed mother ‘suffering under a corpulency unparalleled in the memoirs of human monsters’ and doting on a pet toad (H, p. 155): to be fat is, for the modern woman, a horror of Gothic proportions. Cherubina’s ‘mother’ assures her appalled daughter, however, that ‘This deplorable plumpness proceeds from want of exercise’ (H, p. 154). At the same time, though, anticipating the spirit of Jo Brand, she confesses not to dreams of a convent life or reunion with her long-lost husband, but to fantasies of ‘favourite pullets’ and ‘inimitable apple-pies’ (H, p. 155). Shuddering at the sight of her obesity,

36 Gothic and the Comic Turn

Cherubina finds herself hating her long-lost ‘mother’ and despising her ‘mother’s’ memoirs (entitled Il Castello di Grimgothico, or Memoirs of Lady Hysterica Belamour: A Novel by Anna Maria Marianne Matilda Pottingen, Author of the Bloody Bodkin, Sonnets on Most of the Plants, etc. etc. etc.). At this point we should remind ourselves that Cherubina, in all her slim pallor, is the doppelgänger of Cherry Wilkinson, the farmer’s daughter, brought up, no doubt, on a wholesome diet enriched by butter and cream – and a young woman who is acutely aware of her name as suggestive of an all-too-visible corporeality: what a name – Cherry! It reminds one so much of plumpness and ruddy health. Cherry – better be called Pine-apple at once. There is a green and yellow melancholy in Pine-apple, that is infinitely preferable. I wonder if Cherry could possibly be an abbreviation of CHERUBINA. (H, p. 11) Indeed, Cherry’s own dreams have been marked, like her mother’s, by fantasies of food. A late-evening reading of Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, which evokes images of spectres and corpses, results in a particularly enticing gastronomic dream: I found myself seated at a dinner-table; and while I was expecting the repast, lo, the Genius of Dinner appeared. He had a mantle laced with silver eels, and his locks were dropping with costly soups. A crown of golden fishes was on his head, and pheasants’ wings at his shoulders. A flight of little tartlets fluttered around him, and the sky rained down hock, comfits, and Tokay. As I gazed on him, he vanished in a sigh, that was strongly impregnated with the fumes of brandy. (H, p. 16) On waking, Cherry is horrified at the healthy appetite the dream has betrayed: ‘what disgusting visions, when I ought to have dreamt of nothing but coffins and ladies in black’ (H, p. 16). In her fantasy life as Cherubina de Willoughby, of course, she is slim and needs little sustenance: the name ‘Cherubina’, while suggesting cherubic proportions, also evokes an aerial transcendence of the corporeal. Sliding between these relative images of female corporeality, invited to laugh at them, the reader is offered a position of critical distance from contemporaneous and influential notions of the desirable female body. The ‘target’ of parody is thus not just other works of fiction: it also engages with

The Late Romantic Turn 37

subtly influential forms of coded discourse. In this way, parodic writing can offer an intellectual liberation from powerful social constructs. Similarly, woman’s vexed relationship to property rights and the ambiguous nature of her status as a legal subject during the eighteenth century is implicitly questioned through Cherubina’s appropriation of Monkton Castle. Energized by her campaign to seize the castle, Cherubina blossoms as leader against the siege to reclaim it. ‘I stood, and gloried in my strength’ she writes (H, p. 246). In her rousing speech to her fifty followers, she promises them, should they be victorious, ‘all such laws and institutions as shall secure their happiness’ (H, p. 248). In 1813, when The Heroine was published, women could hold property legally only if they were over 21 and unmarried. It was not until the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1870 that a married woman could legally hold property in her own name; before then the estate of a married woman passed to her husband. Money could be held in trust for a married woman but had to be managed by an independent party, which meant that the woman had no direct access to it. There was also the possibility of the separate maintenance agreement, which allowed the husband and wife to live separately and through which the husband agreed to his wife having direct access to her money.61 Such apparent advances were, however, counterbalanced by severe legal restrictions in other ways: for example, a daughter could not directly inherit her father’s property; it could only be left in trust, giving her the right to income deriving from it but no right to sell it. The many changes affecting women’s property rights during the eighteenth century suggest at best an equivocal attitude to the female subject. Whereas the legal code during this time clearly indicates that the institution of property is essential to the identity of the legal subject, the lesser privileges accorded to women and the emergence of what Sharpe has called ‘the bloody code’ (which saw the number of capital offences rise from 50 to 200 during the period62) express an acute anxiety about the security of the (masculine) legal subject in the face of the irrational as represented by the feminine and by the mob.63 Moreover, Cherubina – as leader of a ‘mob’ which includes Irishmen and as a ‘heroine’ who has a devoted Irish follower (Jerry Sullivan) – should be seen in the context of the period 1800–1829 which saw a huge rise in the publication of novels about Ireland and Irish characters. The most famous of these, Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), deals with the condition of Ireland and features a beautiful, intelligent Irish girl called Glorvina who is devoted to her father and whose marriage to an English nobleman metaphorically suggests a reconciliation between England and Ireland.

38 Gothic and the Comic Turn

Barrett’s novel, which reasserts the supremacy of ‘Englishness’, nevertheless still functions, like Owenson’s, as a work in which Ireland becomes ‘a privileged site . . . for the residual revolutionary romance of sensibility’.64 As Jacqueline Belanger has noted, Barrett’s portrayal of ‘Irishness’ in The Heroine links the 1798 Rebellion with the French Revolution as potential threats to English society.65 The novel’s closure, although apparently comically satisfying and reassuring in its restoration of the status quo, consigns its heroine to a cosy domestic oblivion. We see Cherubina transformed back into Cherry Wilkinson, ‘the daughter of an honest squire’ (H, p. 289), rather than into the long-lost offspring of an aristocratic family. We also see her about to marry – an act which will result in her giving up the limited property rights she would have enjoyed as an unmarried woman. In ‘educating’ her out of reading romances and Gothic fiction, her future husband educates her out of visions of independence. Indeed, in giving her a copy of Don Quixote to read, Robert Stuart draws her attention to the deleterious effect of romances such as ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian, and the Bravo of Venice’ which ‘act upon the mind like intoxicating stimulants’ (H, p. 293). This degenerate form of reading he then links to a stage of moral decline, and from there it is only a short step to the ‘vicious refinement’ of a ‘depraved’ France (H, p. 293) and, presumably, to the turbulence of a ‘wild’ Ireland. We might remember here Burke’s description which, drawing on Milton’s Paradise Lost, evokes ‘the revolutionary harpies of France’ as ‘sprung from night and Hell, or from that chaotic anarchy which generates equivocally “all monstrous and prodigious things”’.66 Cherry is thus directed by her future husband to a ‘more rational line of reading’ which includes ‘morality, history, languages’ (H, p. 294) and is recuperated back into ‘Englishness’ and a proper femininity underwritten discursively by the law of England in 1813. This construct of femininity is a domestic, sentimentalized one which is easily identified with the emotional and the private world. It is, as Susan Okin has observed, ironic that at the very historical moment when ‘the freedom, individuality, and rationality of men was coming to be recognized as the foundation of their political and legal equality’, women were being represented as ‘creatures of sentiment and love rather than of the rationality that was perceived as necessary for citizenship’.67 However, as we have noted, The Heroine ‘is full of parodic and selfreferential explications of narration itself, and the power that narration provides’.68 Whilst it seems, on the one hand, a reactionary text which safely recuperates its transgressive heroine back into middle-class ideology

The Late Romantic Turn 39

and which defuses both foreign and domestic threats to national identity, the verbal brio with which Barrett describes Cherry’s adventures imprints quite firmly in the reader’s mind an imagined alternative world in which Frenchmen and Irishmen represent excitement rather than threat and in which women are rabble rousers and property owners. The tensions within the novel thus perhaps reflect the tensions evident within English law itself as capitalism develops. For while, on the one hand, the law in the eighteenth century was seeking to advance economic freedom through the development of contractarian doctrine, on the other it saw itself as the instrument whereby both aristocratic privilege and the essence of the traditional matrimonial bond could be preserved. In this respect, Eaton Stannard Barrett’s novel, a best-seller in its own time, deserves more critical attention than it has attracted so far. Certainly, The Heroine amply demonstrates Hutcheon’s claim that parody is not mere imitation ‘but imitation characterized by ironic inversion’; it repeats, but it offers ‘repetition with critical difference’.69 In his essay, ‘Law and the Gothic Imagination’, Leslie J. Moran argues that law, in the form of Equity and its Court of Chancery – ‘a distinct institution, jurisdiction and jurisprudence that emerged within English law in the sixteenth century’, haunts modernity as something archaic, deadening and labyrinthine.70 In the nineteenth-century English novel, lawyers often function either as the dead hand of the past, crippling the resources and spirit of the living (as in Dickens’s Bleak House); or as figures of guidance and integrity (as in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White); or as offering a discursive challenge to a modern discipline, such as science, which seems to threaten the social order (as in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). Moran goes on to suggest that: The particular tropes of law (madness, unreason, corruption, a tangle of tortuous and perplexing enigmas and idiosyncrasies) also need to be understood as precursors to another manifestation of law: law as a form of violence through which the social order is made possible. Here law operates according to the logic of the sublime – a divine, (super)natural, terror.71 In works such as Bleak House, The Woman in White and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the law is the Law of the Father, superficially benign but often oppressive and tyrannical both as a social and a psychic force. When, however, Gothic takes a comic turn, as in Castle Rackrent and The Heroine, the representation of the law in this way is inflected with a witty irreverence that dismantles its claims to sublimity.

40 Gothic and the Comic Turn

We can relate this observation concerning the law to various theories of comedy that emerged during the late Romantic period. Romanticism is often seen as a form of passionate solipsism that privileged intensity and individual feeling over rationality and the mundane business of economics and social co-operation. Taking Burke’s emphasis in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) on fear as a key source of the sublime,72 critics have tended to construct Romanticism as placing awe, terror and ecstasy above laughter, pleasure and mere delight as ways of knowing. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that we have somewhat overlooked the number of comic and parodic works written in the late Romantic period, although more recently Gary Dyer’s attempt to reappraise the role of Romantic satire has revealed the strong seam of comic writing that runs through Romanticism.73 As David Kent has pointed out, however, ‘Dyer’s ascription of the comic with the parodic misrepresents the fierce ideological battleground parody frequently embodied.’74 Of course, parody can be seen as its own worst enemy: in making obvious its own highly intertextual nature, it frequently draws the accusation that it is merely derivative.75 Moreover, what Linda Hutcheon has defined as ‘the continuing strength of a Romantic aesthetic that values genius, originality and individuality’ has worked against a more positive reception of the parodic. As she notes: Michel Foucault (1977) has argued that the entire concept of the artist or author as an original instigator of meaning is only a privileged moment of individualization in the history of art. In that light, it is likely that the Romantic rejection of parodic forms as parasitic reflected a growing capitalist ethic that made literature into a commodity to be owned by an individual.76 Yet there was Romantic interest in the comic and the parodic although it blossomed relatively late. As Thomas H. Schmid has pointed out, a look at the chronology is revealing: between 1817 and 1822 Melincourt, Beppo, Nightmare Abbey, Witch of Atlas, Swellfoot the tyrant and Peter the Bell the Third are published. Throughout this period as well, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb and even Shelley (to a minor degree) wrote critically on the comic. What interest the comic has for Romanticism seems to burgeon during this period, when humour can be seen as a challenge to Romanticism’s apparent

The Late Romantic Turn 41

seriousness or even ‘farce of . . . tragic nostalgia’ as Jerome McGann puts it.77 In this context, Castle Rackrent can be understood as ushering in a parodic movement seen as substantial in its impact, then if not now. Traditionally it has been assumed that the tide of such parodies, which appeared from the late eighteenth century until 1820, was a reaction to the excesses of horror and terror that characterized the Gothic text of the same period. Devendra P. Varma, for example, notes in The Gothic Flame that during this period, ‘The frequent parodies and satires are symptomatic of the new sensibility which was manifesting itself in English prose fiction as the Gothic manner became exhausted.’78 Marilyn Butler, while seeing the Gothic novel as ‘a product of the three decades of quickening pulse, the revolutionary era from about 1760 to about 1797’, a product which came to full fruition in the work of Ann Radcliffe, also notes that after about 1797, all self-respecting novelists steered clear of the Gothic for about two decades unless it was to parody it.79 Until recently, the general critical assumption was that the aim of such parodies was to entertain and to educate; Devendra Varma describes their authors as ‘teachers of moral prudence whose influence had been impaired by the flood, but not destroyed’.80 In other words, comic Gothic at the opening of the nineteenth century has frequently been seen as a reinstatement of Enlightenment values in the face of Romantic idealism: rationality, common sense and the importance of the social fabric were to be valued above the thoughts and feelings, passions and emotions, of the individual. Accordingly, what we might call the comic Gothic novel has often been read as conservative in its recuperation of the individual into the social fabric – and, indeed, endings such as Catherine Morland’s engagement in Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Scythrop’s choice of a glass of Madeira sherry over death by pistol shot in Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey do seem to dissolve the darker questions raised earlier in the text. However, contemporary theorists seem to have been rather more nuanced in their responses to parody. For example, Jean Paul Richter set out to define the value of humour in his School for Aesthetics, published in 1804, in a manner that allows it a more subtle role as part of a cultural dialogue. In representing it as an aspect of the imagination, Jean-Paul was trying to reclaim humour as a legitimate aspect of Romantic sensibility. He was also, if unwittingly, echoing Walpole’s sense that the embrace of extremities – including those of comedy and tragedy – can set ‘the

42 Gothic and the Comic Turn

powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention’.81 What is interesting for our purposes, however, is the fact that in defining the value of humour (which he describes as the Romantic comic) as an aspect of the imagination, Richter offers an exposition of it as ‘inverse sublime’, a concept which perhaps derives from eighteenthcentury appropriations of Longinus’s theories of the sublime. Whereas the Burkean sublime evokes terror, awe and fear, the ‘inverse sublime’ invites an ironic detachment from the world. This results from the juxtaposition of the details of a finite world with the idea of the infinite: we thus become aware of the world’s folly and detached from ‘both great and small, because before infinity everything is equal and nothing’.82 This could be read as a variation on the Romantic withdrawal from the social, but Richter’s insistence that humour encourages sympathy rather than condemnation prevents his ideas on the comic from embracing misanthropy. In laughing at humanity rather than at individuals, we rise above the finite and so experience a sense of the ‘inverse sublime’. Richter’s argument here is clearly an attempt to bring humour into the legitimizing embrace of Romantic aesthetics. In Thomas A. Schmid’s words: the experience of humor as adumbrated by Romantic theorists is subjective, imaginative and liberating. Because humor ‘annihilates’ finite categories of the understanding and levels all before the ‘infinite’, it subverts the moral certitude of forms like satire, and encourages sympathy rather than ethereal withdrawal . . .83 At the same time, however, the text throws the frames of social reference into doubt and makes moral judgement appear a matter of relativity: it is in this sense that the comic can function as intellectually liberating and provocative. ‘Humour’, writes Richter, ‘is a raving Socrates, as the ancients call Diogenes’.84 It is in this spirit, we would argue, that Edgeworth and Barrett give the Gothic a comic turn, particularly in relation to their engagement with the law, which is represented in both novels in a highly equivocal manner. It is, indeed, as Leslie Moran claims, ‘a form of violence through which the social order is made possible’ but – because it is able to effect change and is liable to change itself (albeit slowly) – it is also the means by which that very social order can be challenged. It is linked not just to the sublime, as Moran would have it, but also to the inverse sublime, as in Jean Paul Richter’s definition. Drawing on eighteenth-century conventions of character representation, and in dialogue with Romantic ideas of humour and the

The Late Romantic Turn 43

sublime, these texts catch the spirit of change as one century rolls into the next. The ambiguity with which the law is presented in both novels undoubtedly reflects the complex political and social changes that took place during the eighteenth century in England and Ireland and that resulted in the law both extending – and constraining – the rights of women and of men without property. We conclude, then, that in subjecting Gothic devices to comic treatment, Castle Rackrent and The Heroine foreground the changing nature of the subject at the dawn of the nineteenth century. This subject, in both England and Ireland, is constructed not only through the discourses of gender, class and nation, but also through the language of the law which binds the body to property as well as to codes of behaviour. The choice of parodic Gothic as a mode of representation allows both writers not only to explore the potentially liberating effects of the law for women and for the underclasses within a crumbling aristocratic system but also to evoke the ‘remoter’ shadows of the Gothic phenomena which inevitably dog a social structure increasingly based on Enlightenment patriarchal values. These include imprisonment within the home (both literal and symbolic), exploitation of labour, and psychological disempowerment through infantilization or patronage. In this respect, it is worth citing Robert Phiddian – whose words we quoted in the Introduction – once more: all parody refunctions pre-existing text(s) and/or discourses, so it can be said that these verbal structures are called to the readers’ minds and then placed under erasure. A necessary modification of the original idea is that we must allow the act of erasure to operate critically rather than as merely neutral cancellation of its object. Parodic erasure disfigures its pre-texts in various ways that seek to guide our re-evaluation or refiguration of them. It is dialogical and suggestive as well as negatively deconstructive, for it (at least potentially) can achieve controlled and meta-fictional commentary as well as purely arbitrary problematisation.85 The high level of equivocation in both novels is thus an inevitable result of Gothic taking a parodic comic turn. By rendering in comic vein the tropes, characters and settings of the Gothic text, both authors also revive memories (however faint) of barbaric realities. In this way both novels, like most parodies, are Janus-faced; they look backwards as well as forwards. Addressing themselves to the shared knowledge and values of what Wayne Booth has called ‘amicable communities’,86 both

44 Gothic and the Comic Turn

Castle Rackrent and The Heroine, like all good parodies, are hard to pin down. Their ‘meanings’, which slither between thoughts of a comforting return to tradition and fantasies of social transformation, are as slippery as the silver eels in Cherubina’s dream. As we have suggested, it is not surprising that such texts tend to emerge during periods of great cultural, political and social change. However, whereas many Gothic texts confront the reader with anxiety and terror, comic Gothic texts such as Castle Rackrent and The Heroine, through their use of parody, relativize and to some extent neutralize the threat of change or difference. Their ambiguity captures a shift in subjectivity at a crucial moment. That shift is intimately connected with the rapid development of the legal framework in both England and Ireland in the eighteenth century and the textual creation of the legal subject during that period. Thus both novels seem to envisage the freedoms which might be accorded to this new legal subject while noting that those very freedoms would also accelerate the destruction of the old order. Both form part of a sophisticated cultural dialogue in which humour and the wit of the comic turn assert themselves as ways of exploring change and hybridity. We conclude, then, that parody, as a complex form of textual response and negotiation, always carries a freight of ideological ambivalence which is as culturally significant as the issues raised by the ‘serious’ source which it burlesques. Furthermore, these parodic texts, necessarily hybrid and self-reflexive, anticipate the complex way in which the nineteenth-century novel will absorb the fantastic and the Gothic into the ‘real’.

2 Realism and Romance

It is clear that the tendency of early Gothic fiction to self-parody did not put it beyond the reach of further parodic treatment, in which the mix of horror and humour tipped towards the latter. As the conventions of the Gothic genre became clichéd, they lost their powers of horror and became ripe for parody. In comic parodic Gothic, excess and the grotesque produce humour, not horror. This chapter, however, examines a different kind of Gothic comic turn. While (as critics broadly agree) the Gothic novel as a genre (however diverse its examples) can be located in the period from The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Gothic as a mode of writing pervaded the fiction (and, indeed, other kinds of writing) of the nineteenth century as a kind of textual haunting. Similarly, the settings of Gothic became no longer confined to those of the earlier genre. As Julian Wolfreys suggests, ‘Escaping from the tomb and the castle, the gothic in the Victorian period becomes arguably even more potentially terrifying because of its ability to manifest itself anywhere.’1 The seeds of this dispersal may be seen in novels like The Heroine, Northanger Abbey and Castle Rackrent, which had simultaneously parodied Gothic novels and represented everyday experience in terms of Gothic discourses. This perception of the Gothic dimensions of ‘real life’ is the focus of this chapter, where we will argue that the quotidian is imbued with Gothic threat, particularly in the realm of gender relations. In the midst of such threat, however, there is a comic turn that uses this vision to glimpse an alternative perspective, the possibility of other ways of doing and being. Thus, in the texts we consider, there is a fine balance between the characteristic Gothic anxiety about the unstable and fragmented self and glimpses of this relational understanding of identity. Again we see how Gothic’s comic turn is intimately connected with the emergence of modern subjectivity. 45

46 Gothic and the Comic Turn

We begin with a text that holds a key position in relation to Gothic criticism. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tales represent a world in which ordinary everyday life is shot through with horror, mystery and the grotesque.2 In Hoffmann’s work, the uncanny is very clearly not relegated to another place or another time; it is at hand. His short story ‘The Sandman’ (1817) forms the literary basis of Freud’s seminal essay ‘The “Uncanny”’ (1919). For Freud: [the uncanny] is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term.3 ‘The Sandman’ is a tale about the descent into madness and death of a young man, Nathanael, who is engaged to be married to a young woman, Klara, who has been like a sister to him since childhood. In Freud’s reading, the story of Nathanael’s madness and his obsession with the ocular constitute a symbolic working of the complex relationship between the heimlich and the unheimlich (and indeed the conflation of the two) that produces the uncanny. Recognizing that Hoffmann’s tale ‘contains the original of Olympia, the doll in the first act of Offenbach’s opera, Tales of Hoffman’, he then states that he thinks that most readers will agree with him that ‘the theme of the doll . . . who is to all appearances a living being, [cannot] by any means be the only, or indeed the most important, element that must be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by the story’.4 Freud is dismissive of this element of the tale, claiming that Hoffmann ‘treats the episode of Olympia with a faint touch of satire and uses it to make fun of the young man’s idealization of his mistress’ thus deflecting for a time the uncanny effects. Far more important for Freud’s purposes is the figure of the Sandman, ‘who tears out children’s eyes’.5 Subsequent psychoanalytic readings have also interpreted the story in terms of persecution fantasies and the castration complex.6 Freud’s preoccupations, we might suggest, blind him to other significant aspects of Hoffmann’s text.7 Viewed from a different perspective, ‘The Sandman’, while certainly entering the realm of the uncanny and the dread that attends it, may also be seen as executing the comic turn and, in so doing, demonstrating the hybridity that characterizes its legacy. The comic turn centres on Olympia; at the same time that the reader recoils from the horror of Nathanael’s fate and the demonic forces that seem to propel it, she or

Realism and Romance 47

he is invited to laugh at both the grotesque humour of the automaton and the satirical treatment of Nathanael’s – and others’ – responses to it. Through the scenes depicting his reactions to both his fiancée, Klara (with her sound common sense), and Olympia, Nathanael’s tortured subjectivity is played out comically. Even though he acknowledges that ‘the story-teller has a peculiarly directive power over us’, Freud is not inclined to examine the narrative form, which creates shifts of perspective and a polyphony of voices.8 The narrative begins with a set of letters and Nathanael’s voice is heard first in a letter to his friend Lothar, in which he claims that ‘something . . . threatens to destroy my life with its devilish power’.9 He tells how memories of a traumatic childhood experience had been stirred in him by the visit a few days earlier of an inventor and weather-glass vendor calling himself Giuseppe Coppola. This experience centres around the death of his father, which he associates with the figure of the lawyer Coppelius, someone whom he identifies with the terrifying story of ‘The Sandman’ as told to him by his nurse.10 The second letter is written to Nathanael by Klara, his fiancée, who has mistakenly opened his letter to Lothar. Her writing embodies the voice of common sense.11 She rationalizes Nathanael’s memory of the uncanny and sinister power of Coppelius: I want to tell you straight away that, in my opinion, all the horror and ghastliness you speak about was only in your imagination, and that the true reality of the outer world had very little part in it. (S, p. 44) Yet even she also recognizes that ‘even in gay, carefree, unfettered spirits there may dwell an intimation of some dark power which strives to destroy us in our innermost being’ (S, p. 45); however, as defence for Nathanael’s tortured psyche, she offers rationality and the will: If strengthened by clean living, we have a mind strong enough to recognize the true nature of such an evil, alien influence and to pursue with unwavering steps the path upon which personal preference and daily work have set our feet, then this sinister force is vanquished in its vain struggle with an image that should be the reflection of our true self. (S, p. 45) Nathanael’s reply to Lothar introduces the figure of Olympia, the ‘daughter’ of the recently arrived physics professor, Spalanzani.

48 Gothic and the Comic Turn

Nathanael is fascinated by this ‘tall, beautifully dressed woman, with a slender and perfectly proportioned figure’ (S, p. 47) even though he is disquieted by her eyes, which ‘seemed to have a rather fixed look in them’: ‘it gave me quite a strange feeling’ he says (S, p. 47). Shortly afterwards, the narrative shifts to an omniscient third person, a narrator who identifies himself as ‘one of a weird and wonderful race called authors’ and as a friend of Lothar (hence his access to the letters). The narrator recognizes the ‘wonder and strangeness’ of the tale he is telling and acknowledges the likely incredulity of his audience. He justifies the epistolary opening of the story by claiming that he is trying to avoid the comic turn. His original opening, he claims, led him to ‘see in Nathanael’s wild facial contortions something rather droll: but the tale is not a humorous one’ (S, p. 49). Such denial acknowledges the slight shift of focus that can create the comic turn. Hoffmann’s narrator perhaps protests too much. While Freud certainly does not find much to laugh at in Hoffmann’s tale – and indeed it would be a callous reader who would find Nathanael’s descent into madness and death amusing – the mechanisms within the story that precipitate the madness do give rise to comic effects which are played as such, despite the narrator’s reluctance to indulge them. They are focused on this figure of Olympia who, indeed, is not a living person but an automaton, the creation of Spalanzani with the aid of Coppola, who has supplied the artificial eyes. Nathanael is smitten at first sight by Olympia: he can ‘see quite plainly the angelic loveliness of her features’ but is disconcerted by her fixed gaze. ‘Indeed’, he continues, ‘I might even say they appeared sightless, for it looked to me as if she were sleeping with open eyes’ (S, p. 47). Thus begins a counterpoint between the truly horrific scenes of Nathanael’s imagination and delusions (particularly as they relate to Klara) and the comic effects of his infatuation with Olympia.12 He composes a poem in which Coppelius destroys his happiness with Klara; again the eyes are the focus of the horror: Finally as they were standing at the altar, the frightful figure of Coppelius appeared and touched Klara’s heavenly eyes, which then shot into Nathanael’s breast, like bloody sparks, singeing and burning; whereupon Coppelius seized him and cast him into a blazing ring of fire that whirled round with the speed of a tornado and, hissing and roaring, swept him away. (S, p. 53) Nathanael effectively turns his back on his beloved Klara in favour of the mechanical Olympia. A series of hyperbolic descriptions attempt to

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reify Klara: ‘architects praised the pure proportions of her figure’ (S, p. 50), for example. Klara’s eyes, the narrator tells us, have been compared by a painter with ‘a lake painted by Ruisdael mirroring the skies’ perfect azure, the woods carpeted with wild flowers, and all the landscape’s gay, bright life’ (S, p. 50). However, behind those eyes lies a strong personality that refuses to be reduced to an artist’s stereotype: Klara possessed the vital imaginative powers of a gay, carefree, childlike being, a profoundly womanly, delicate nature, and a really keen, sharply analytical mind. Airy-fairy people had short shrift from her. (S, p. 51) Some thought Klara to be ‘cold, unfeeling and prosaic’ (S, p. 51) but Nathanael, who ‘pursued knowledge and the arts with eager assiduity’ (S, p. 51), loved her. In turning away from her, therefore, he is behaving in a way that endorses the gender stereotypes of his time. Unable to engage in a genuinely reciprocal relationship with Klara, he turns instead to Olympia.13 He becomes besotted by her, bewitched through the agency of the evil Coppola. This makes only for comic effect. Other people take her ‘rigid stiffness and muteness’ as signs of ‘total idiocy’; Nathanael will have none of it, assuming that it is ‘their own idiocy that prevents them from appreciating Olympia’s profoundly brilliant mind’ (S, p. 63). Nathanael’s friends can sense what he cannot, that Olympia is without life: ‘This Olympia has made quite an uncanny impression upon us, we don’t want to have anything to do with her; it seemed to us as if she was merely pretending to be a living creature’ (S, p. 64). For Nathanael, however, it is Olympia’s capacity to be such a good listener that is one of her prime attractions; failing to find a receptive audience elsewhere, he muses aloud for hours on their love and reads her everything he has ever written. ‘Only thou, and thou alone, canst understand me completely!’ rejoices Nathanael, absorbed in his narcissistic worship of the wooden doll and having ‘completely forgotten the existence of Klara, whom he had once loved’ (S, p. 65). Looking through the telescope he has bought from Coppola, the ‘blank and dead’ eyes of Olympia begin to undergo a transformation as he sharpens the focus: ‘It was as if the power of sight had been granted her at the very instant; her glances became more and more animated, dancing like flames’ (S, p. 58). Later, at the Professor’s house, he trains the telescope on Olympia again and ‘it was then that he was aware how she was looking towards him, with eyes full of longing’ (S, p. 61).14 Thus, Nathanael projects into the blank eyes of Olympia the unquestioning feminine adoration he desires, idolizing her in return.

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This phase of the story comes to a climax in a comic moment rendered more grotesque by Nathanael’s worship of Olympia. Even Wolfgang Kayser, who sees the novella as ‘an account of the triumph of the inner life of a highly gifted, imaginative, artistic individual – a process set in motion by the author and accelerated through repeated encounters with an ominous power’, and whose view of the grotesque locates it in the uncanny, reluctantly recognizes the comic potential of Nathanael’s infatuation with Olympia: It is possible to give comic expression to the fact that he mistakes a doll for a human being, thinks that she loves him and confesses his love to her, but Hoffmann’s presentation of the matter is so genuinely grotesque that its effect upon us is humorous and horrible at the same time.15 Nathanael witnesses Spalanzani and Coppola engaged in a tug of war over what he thinks is Olympia’s body: The Professor had hold of a woman’s figure by the shoulders; the Italian, Coppola, had grabbed her feet, and they were hauling and tugging her this way and that, quarrelling with furious anger over her possession. (S, p. 67) Nathanael’s surprise at the incongruity of this behaviour is rapidly superseded by his recognition that Olympia is a ‘lifeless doll’ with a ‘deathly white, waxen face [that] had no eyes, only black holes’ and is the point at which the text hovers, absurdly, between the comic and the horrific. The reader sees through his eyes ‘lying on the floor, a pair of bloody eyes, staring at him’, a gruesome image that endows Olympia with the characteristics of life just as they are taken away from her by the revelation that she is an automaton. The focalization of the narrative then turns away from Nathanael and what ensues teeters on the brink of the comic through its demonstration of characteristically Gothic excess. The injured Spalanzani throws the eyes at Nathanael so they strike him in the chest, precipitating another bout of madness, in which he repeats ‘Wooden doll, whee, pretty wooden doll, turn and turn’ and attempts to throttle the professor. In his frenzy he loses himself as a speaking subject – ‘His words degenerated into a terrifying, animal roaring’ – and he is conducted very rapidly to the lunatic asylum (S, p. 68). Daniel Pick, recognizing that the ‘eyes become ever more prominent, disturbing and dangerous for Nathanael’ as the story progresses, locates

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in them that relational subjectivity that makes the human subject such a suitable case for hypnotism: We experience, but also project meaning into the other’s eyes; moreover, we introject some sense of the thoughts and feelings, the love or hate, that lie behind those eyes.16 In ‘The Sandman’, Olympia’s eyes follow Nathanael into the personal hell of his insanity. What he saw in the eyes of the lifeless automaton he himself had put there. Pick makes the connection between Coppola and Svengali, the demonic mesmerist of George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, Trilby. James McGlathery also makes the connection between what he calls ‘the robot-fantasy in Hoffmann’s tales’ and dreams of mesmeric domination and submission that are often found in the stories but attaches it more specifically to the fear of sexual passion.17 In the completion of the comic turn, Nathanael’s madness is temporarily abandoned in the narrative in favour of a comic-ironic post-mortem on the social effects of Professor Spalanzani’s life-like doll. The narrator addresses the reader directly, informing her/him that ‘it was generally considered an unwarrantable fraud to palm off on level-headed tea parties (Olympia had shone at several) a wooden doll instead of a living person’ (S, p. 68). Gothic’s fascination with the permeable boundary between the alive and the not-alive surfaces in comic mode with the observation that: ‘the story of the automaton had taken a firm root in their minds, and in fact an awful mistrust of the human figure had crept into their thoughts’ (S, p. 69). Such anxiety is, however, treated comically;18 it is the reactions of people on realizing that the automaton had behaved rather too well according to their restrictive gender codes that is the butt of comedy here: Now, in order to be certain that one was not in love with a wooden doll, many suitors insisted that the loved one should sing and dance somewhat off the beat, that while reading they should sew, knit, play with their pets and so on; but above all they required that their ladies should not just listen but should also frequently speak, and in such a way that their speech should actually express their thoughts and feelings. (S, p. 69) In the ‘ambiguous Gothic’ world of ‘The Sandman’ the uncanny sits side by side with a mundane reality.19 The uncanny focuses on the tortured psyche of one man and although there are clues that this is not just a

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case of ‘all in the mind’ – that there are indeed supernatural forces at work – the effects of the Olympia deception are translated here from the melodramatic effects of Nathanael’s madness into the seeds of a more pervasive anxiety. This is an anxiety about what it means to be human; it sits side by side with the Gothic excess of Nathanael’s story and receives comic treatment in a much lower key. The other characters are the ‘normal’ people, those who have not known ‘The Sandman’, nor looked through Coppola’s telescope. At the end of the tale, the apparently recovered Nathanael is tempted to look through the telescope once more and, seeing Klara through it, he seems to mistake her for Olympia and attempts to throw her to her death before leaping from a high tower to his own, observed by the lawyer Coppelius who then ‘disappeared in the confusion’ (S, p. 72). Horst S. Daemmrich suggests that ‘the last scene reveals perhaps better than any other that the dimension of evil in the world depends upon the observer’s perspective’.20 The tale concludes with a brief reference to Klara’s future happiness with ‘a loving husband in front of the door of a beautiful country house, with two lively boys playing beside them’: a sentimentalized image of ‘normality’ that represents a retreat from the problems that the text has raised and one that might well be regarded as parodic (S, p. 72). 21 Hoffmann’s tale presents, therefore, a Gothic hybrid mixture of the fantastic and the ‘real’, the horrific and the comic, that represents a serious engagement with the fragmentation of the modern subject.22 Whereas early Gothic novels, as we have noted, were located in the dim recesses of a distant history and the ominous shadows of medieval buildings, in ‘The Sandman’, the modern world of rationalism and scientific experiment sits side by side with medievalism in the form of alchemy and the dark and inexplicable in an uneasy co-existence. The comic turn in the text exploits a modern grotesquerie in the form of the automaton which gives rise to questions about modern masculine and feminine subjectivity. The uneasy hybridity of Hoffmann’s Gothic and the themes it explores finds numerous echoes in later nineteenthcentury works. In American writing, for example, critics have recognized the debt of such writers as Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe23 and Nathaniel Hawthorne.24 No critic, however, has made any claims for Hoffmann’s having any direct influence on the English novelist, George Meredith. Nor has Meredith figured in the critical recuperation of Gothic (his name does not, for example, even appear in the index of Robbins and Wolfreys’ edited collection of essays, Victorian Gothic).25 Meredith now occupies a far more marginal place in the history of English writing than he did at

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the beginning of the twentieth century, when he enjoyed something of the status of ‘Grand Old Man of Letters’. Both a novelist and a poet, he is better known as a writer of fiction but one who tended to resist categorization. V.S. Pritchett refers to Meredith as ‘the tailor-novelist who was always trying on new jackets in front of the reader and the new jacket is for himself (and for his characters) a new persona’.26 A persona that has not been attributed to him is that of Gothic novelist, although Judith Wilt’s perceptive chapter on The Egoist in The Readable People of George Meredith does identify that novel as ‘a Gothic Romance’.27 There is ample evidence in his work, however, that he engages with the Gothic tradition in what for him was an ongoing tension between realism and romanticism. He was also fascinated by what he called ‘the comic spirit’.28 What is particularly interesting for our purposes is that the Gothic trace, the Gothic moment in Meredith’s work is characteristically comic and verging on the parodic. There is, for example, the marvellous moment in The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871) when a statue comes to life in the best tradition of Walpole. The Adventures of Harry Richmond is a bildungsroman in which the eponymous hero is, for much of its length, a ‘shuttlecock’ who flies between the two worlds represented by his father and his grandfather respectively.29 The father figure is persistently problematical in Meredith’s novels: as we shall see, Sir Austin Feverel makes his son the subject of an experiment; and the Egoist in the novel of the same name, Willoughby Patterne, grows up fatherless.30 In The Adventures of Harry Richmond, Harry’s grandfather Squire Beltham, the epitome of an eighteenth-century English squire, and his father, Richmond Roy, a romantic fantasist who claims to be the unacknowledged son of royalty, enact a battle for Harry’s heart and mind.31 In the novel’s supreme comic Gothic moment, Richmond Roy reveals himself in the shape of the statue come to life. He has secured employment for himself as ‘fun-maker’ at the court of a German prince. Pledged to have a bronze statue erected in time for a special celebration and failing to have it completed, in desperation he has himself coated in bronze and takes its place. His daring ploy would have worked but for the unexpected appearance of his son, who has travelled to Germany in search of him; this causes him to be overcome with emotion and to speak out. The narration of this event is played for comic effect. Unveiled, the statue is ‘superb – horse and rider in new bronze polished by sunlight’ (HR, p. 193). It is admired as being ‘life-like’ (HR, p. 193). Such is the war-like aspect of the figure that the boys are impressed by it, seeing it as ‘a new military triumph of these Germans’ and reflecting

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that ‘no Prince Eugene – nay, nor Marlborough, had such a martial figure, such an animated high old warrior’s visage. The bronze features reeked of battle’ (HR, p. 197). Even as they utter these exclamations, they hear it say, ‘Richmond! my son! Richie! Harry Richmond! Richmond Roy!’ (HR, p. 197). This inversion of the classic Gothic trope which, in destabilizing the boundary between the living and the effigy often portends evil, offers here comic incongruity. In the longer run, however, it has its darker side. Harry once again comes under his father’s influence and has a long journey towards an acknowledgement that he will live his life with a sense of responsibility rather than as a romantic narrative. In this novel, however, Gothic has the last word. The larger than life figure, Roy, unintentionally burns down Riversley, the Beltham country house, just at the point when it appears the wiser, mature Harry (disinherited by his grandfather) is to inherit after all through marriage. Just as the Gothic elements associated with romance appear to be banished in favour of the more psychological subtlety of realism, they irrupt violently but, it may be argued, comically. The mellow atmosphere of the preceding chapters is disrupted by what Margaret Tarratt calls ‘an almost surreal note of uncertainty’32 and the reader is reminded forcibly of the power of the irrational, the ‘demonic power of fantasy’, as Gillian Beer puts it.33 The conflagration is caused by Roy’s attempt at an ambitious firework display to welcome the couple home from their wedding journey; in a long line of many, this is his ultimate blunder and it is on a grand scale. The earlier novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) – Meredith’s first lengthy novel – is another bildungsroman and is often seen as a landmark in English fiction. Writing in 1927 and recognizing that Meredith’s novel interrogates and subverts the assumptions of the fictional conventions of realism, J.B. Priestley claims: ‘So far as English fiction is concerned . . . there can be no doubt that the modern novel began with the publication of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel in 1859’.34 Feverel echoes and reverberates with a plurality of voices and perspectives; it foregrounds its own textuality as well containing a wealth of intertextual allusions, juxtaposed in such a way as to imply ironic subversion. It interpolates an apparently omniscient narration (which itself is capable of taking on different literary styles) with the utterances of other invented texts, as well as recognizable literary allusions in an intertextual web. The Ordeal announces its own bifurcated structure by naming one of its middle chapters ‘In Which the Last Act of a Comedy Takes the Place of the First’. The comedy, the first part of the book, hints at a parodic Gothic among its other intertextual allusions. Set in an inhabited

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abbey, Raynham Abbey, the seat of Sir Austin Feverel, it shows a dysfunctional family with an absent mother and a tyrannical father. Sir Austin Feverel is embittered by the desertion of his wife and determines to bring up his infant son by use of a ‘system’. The most insistent interpolation into the omniscient narration is the aphoristic Pilgrim’s Scrip of Sir Austin, which is a structuring device; this is an apparent distillation of wisdom in which the blueprint for the adult Richard is expressed. Its irruption into the narrative becomes increasingly ironic, as it increasingly appears obvious that there is a disjunction between the plan and the life of its object.35 The central underpinning tenet of the System is that it is women who are the ordeal of men. Only when a young man has been carefully brought to maturity may he be capable of encountering this ordeal and emerging triumphant. Thus built into the System is a sequestered adolescence protected from potential corruption in the form of the female. Richard in boyhood is kept at Raynham Abbey and, as puberty approaches, Sir Austin insists that his young female cousin Clare be removed. Gender is at the core of the System, which is based on the premise that it is women who cause men’s fall from grace. It thus perpetuates the myth of ‘The Fall’, deriving its authority from the patriarchal lore of the Bible. The determinism of the Biblical underpinning of the System by the myth of ‘The Fall’ and its allegorizing of the dogma of original sin becomes modified by what Sir Austin sees as the ‘Manichean tendency’, which posits that the struggle between good and evil must be re-enacted on equal terms all over again.36 In locating evil in women, the System is guilty of promoting what we would now recognize as a form of sexual stereotyping; and this is Sir Austin’s perception of women; when he does come to accept Richard’s wife, Lucy, it is as an angel figure. Thus we can recognize what feminist scholarship has identified as the tendency, particularly noticeable in nineteenthcentury texts, to polarize women into two stereotypes: the whore and the Madonna; the angel and the demon.37 The novel sets up a series of ironies in relation to this polarity: Richard is seduced away from the System by an angel figure in the form of Lucy, whom he marries; when she is at last accommodated by Sir Austin into his scheme for his son, it is as a madonna.38 The stereotype is not sustainable (any more than is its opposite) and Lucy is effectively erased from the text in her unexpected and shocking death at the end of the novel.39 In contrast with this tragic conclusion there is in the earlier part of the novel, that designated as ‘comedy’, a playful literary allusiveness at work. In the chapter entitled ‘In Which the Last Act of the Bakewell Comedy is Closed with a Letter’, Hawthorne’s Gothic is parodied. The

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family of Richard’s friend, Ripton Thompson, tease him with a reproduction of the letter, ‘large and illuminated’, ‘this resplendent and haunting A’.40 The joke centres on what ‘A’ stands for – possibly ‘arson’ to Ripton after his and Richard’s firing of Farmer Blaize’s ricks. However, the A remains enigmatic leaving open the possibility, as in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, that it may stand for ‘Adultery’, the absent signifier whose signified lies at the heart of the motive force behind the System as well as constituting Richard’s transgression as an adult. Richard’s mother remains a shadowy figure, at the margins of the novel. She is seen by his cousin Clare once at Raynham when they are children and thought to be a ghost; later, while separated from Lucy, Richard sets out on a crusade to rescue ‘fallen women’ and finds her again, a disgraced figure. Lady Feverel may be seen as the victim of the patriarchal lore that the System enshrines and expresses through The Pilgrim’s Scrip. She personifies the inconsistencies of the ideology: she is both mother and whore. Her first appearance in the novel is given through the eyes of Richard’s cousin, Clare Forey, who believes her to be a ghost. She does indeed ‘haunt’ the life of her husband and consequently her son; she is repressed rather than obliterated. In the ‘comedy’ phase of the novel, however, her manifestation is treated comically and exploited. Construed as ghost, she becomes a comic Gothic figure, transformed into a phantom to explain away the mysterious appearance of ‘a lady’ seen by the seven-year-old Richard bending over his bed and associated with the unfortunate incident of Sir Austin’s brother losing his leg after a cricketing accident: It was recollected that there was a family ghost; and, though no member of the family believed in the ghost, none would have given up a circumstance that testified to its existence; for to possess a ghost is a distinction above titles. (ORF, p. 7) Rumours are kept alive and the west wing retains a ‘bad character’, at least ‘in the susceptible minds of new housemaids and under-cooks’ (ORF, p. 33). There are claims later that Richard’s sensitive and imaginative cousin, Clare, is ill, shocked by the appearance of a ghost in the left wing of the abbey, ‘a ghost of a lady, dressed in deep mourning, a scar on her forehead, and a bloody handkerchief at her breast, frightful to behold’ (ORF, p. 38). Such Gothic excess is treated comically in the ironic narration, represented as ammunition in the gossip wars between Raynham and the neighbouring Lobourne, yet the nature of this apparition remains ambiguous for a while until the narrator steps in to claim that:

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Laying of ghosts is a public duty, and as the mystery of the apparition that had frightened little Clare was never solved on the stage of events at Raynham, where dread walked the Abbey, let us go behind the scenes for a moment. Morally superstitious as the baronet was, the character of his mind was opposed to anything like spiritual agency in the affairs of men, and, when the matter was made clear to him, it shook off a weight of weakness and restored his mental balance; so that from this time he went about more like the man he had once been, grasping more thoroughly the great truth, that This World is well designed. (ORF, p. 87) He thus shows Clare’s mother a letter from his estranged wife saying she will trouble the house no more, demonstrating to her ‘that her Ghost could write words in the flesh’ (ORF, pp. 87–88). Lightly treated, the story of the Raynham Ghost is nonetheless used to identify a domestic monstrosity: the demonization of the woman who has transgressed in this Manichean world view. As Richard elopes with Lucy at the end of the first part of the novel, as he ‘crosses the river of his ordeal’ (ORF, p. 277), comic parody of the Gothic is abandoned and the effects of the ‘Manichean tendency’ are played out in earnest. Meredith became firmly convinced of the power of comedy and his comic credo is set out at some length in his An Essay on Comedy, first delivered as a lecture in 1877. His focus is what he calls ‘the comic spirit’, which he sees as an elevating force producing a sophisticated interrelationship of fellow human beings. According to the Essay: A perception of the Comic Spirit gives high fellowship. You become a citizen of the selecter world, the highest we know of in connection with our own world, which is not supermundane. (EC, p. 91) Much of the Essay is devoted to describing what the Comic is not; Meredith claims that what is known as the English comic tradition is not comic in his sense, and that while the comic is to be found in prose writers like Fielding, Goldsmith, Austen and Galt, and in much poetic writing, ‘generally, however, the English elect excel in satire, and they are noble humorists’. He is at pains, therefore, to distinguish the comic from both humour and satire. Humour he characterizes as a genial, mirth-provoking spirit, associated with sentimentality and writers such as Sterne. In contrast, ‘Comedy . . . is an interpretation of the general mind, and is for that reason kept in restraint’ (EC, p. 85). The satirist, however, ‘is a moral agent, often a social scavenger, working on a storage

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of bile’ (EC, p. 82). It is in relation to satire that Meredith defines irony as ‘the humour of satire’ and claims that: The foppish irony fretting to be seen, and the irony which leers, that you shall not mistake its intention, are failures in satiric effort pretending to the treasures of ambiguity. (EC, p. 83) Comedy, however, is a more cerebral activity than either humour or satire, being what ‘might be called the humour of the mind’: One excellent test of the civilization of a country, as I have said, I take to be the flourishing of the Comic idea and Comedy; and the test of true comedy is that it should awaken thoughtful laughter. (EC, p. 88) Meredith’s comic spirit, therefore, is firmly rooted in the pragmatics of human society. It is, in other words, close to what Gary Handwerk defines as ‘ethical irony’; it is concerned with how people live rather than the impossibility of understanding why.41 It is founded on the pursuit of a consensus, and an acknowledgment of the intersubjective nature of truth: ‘Not to distinguish it is to be bull-blind to the spiritual, and to deny the existence of a mind of man where minds of men are in working conjunction’ (EC, p. 90). The distinction made by Meredith in The Essay between comedy and the comic on the one hand, and humour and satire on the other, may be seen as an attempt to define the former in a new way.42 Far from encouraging conformity to the norms of society, comedy is rather perceived as an engine for change and redefinition. The comic spirit can only prosper in societies where there is some degree of equality between the sexes and Meredith urges cultivated women to recognize that ‘the comic Muse is one of their best friends’ (EC, p. 60). The promotion of the comic spirit, he argues, furthers the best interests of women: Let them look with their clearest vision abroad and at home. They will see that where they have no social freedom, Comedy is absent: where they are household drudges, the form of Comedy is primitive; where they are tolerably independent, but uncultivated, exciting melodrama takes its place, and a sentimental vision of them . . . But where women are on the road to an equal footing with men, in attainments and in liberty . . . there, and only waiting to be transplanted

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from life to the stage, or the novel, or the poem, pure Comedy flourishes. (EC, p. 61) The exercise of the comic spirit Meredith sees as not only a reflection of a relatively advanced state of civilization, but as a force for change much needed in his own society: Now, to look about us in the present time, I think it will be acknowledged that, in neglecting the cultivation of the Comic idea, we are losing the aid of a powerful auxiliar. (EC, p. 62)43 Meredith’s concept of the comic spirit is, then, specific in its attention to the question of gender identity. The thought-provoking propensity of the comic idea is expressed through a now famous metaphor: I do not know that the fly in amber is of any particular use, but the Comic idea enclosed in a comedy makes it more generally perceptible and portable, and that is an advantage. (EC, p. 104) The critical tradition has long acknowledged Meredith’s 1879 novel The Egoist as one of the major comic novels in the language and it may be seen as demonstrating how Gothic can execute a full comic turn. Only Judith Wilt, however, writing in 1975, has seen in The Egoist the dynamic of Gothic at work: He [Meredith] appreciated . . . the Gothic violence that may attend the activity of the fantasy life led by the individual ego under the veneer of civilized man or woman. In The Egoist his attention to this egoist’s fantasy life, an attention focused by extensive use of metaphor, provides a sense of action, danger and romance in a novel where all the events are mental – and no less violent, horrifying, dangerous, threatening and thrilling for being so.44 The Egoist begins with a prelude that relates the novel to the lecture of two years earlier. The opening sentence would appear to forestall any readings of the novel in Gothic terms: Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the outside world, no mire,

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no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing.45 In the space of the first paragraph, however, the language takes a metaphorical turn that signals the Gothic power of the novel to come: The Comic Spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit of them and their speech. For being a spirit, he hunts the spirit in men; vision and ardour constitute his merit; he has not a thought of persuading you to believe in him. (E, p. 33) Clearly situated as an apparently realist novel in an English country house, The Egoist embodies in its language the Gothic monstrosity of an unequal relationship between man and woman as it is endorsed by the prevailing attitudes of the time. The plot of the novel centres on a young woman pressured into an engagement with an eligible young man, her dawning realization of what marriage to him would mean and her increasingly urgent attempts to extricate herself. The egoist of the title is a gentleman of our time and country, of wealth and station; a not flexile figure, do what we may with him; the humour of whom scarcely dimples the surfaces and is distinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality have first made the mild literary angels aware of something comic in him, when they were one and all about to describe the gentleman on the heading of the records baldly (where brevity is most complimentary) as a gentleman of family and property, an idol of a decorous island that admires the concrete. (E, pp. 36–37) Sir Willoughby Patterne in short is not to be taken as an aberration, he is not a monster in deviation; he is not, like Hoffmann’s Nathanael, a tortured artistic soul; he is an archetypal upper-class Englishman.46 Yet he seeks in women that which Nathanael projects into Olympia. Returning from several years abroad after being jilted by his first fiancée, he meets his faithful admirer, Laetitia Dale: He panted. “Your name is sweet English music! And you are well?” The anxious question permitted him to read deeply in her eyes. He

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found the man he sought there, squeezed him passionately, and let her go. (E, p. 59) Clara Middleton may well be a more intelligent heroine than Catherine Morland but, like Austen’s character, her experiences as a guest at the English country house serve to illuminate in comic terms the truly Gothic realities that lay its foundations. If Clara is not Catherine Morland, nor is she Emily St Aubert and Patterne Hall is not a medieval castle. There are no secret chambers and no worm-eaten corpse in effigy. Yet the very language which describes the everyday monster who is Sir Willoughby Patterne and the implications of being closeted with him in holy wedlock is redolent of Gothic horror. The Egoist’s achievement is to use the tropes and language of Gothic to locate monstrosity in the English country house and the English country gentleman. Although bearing very little superficial similarity to Catherine Morland, Clara Middleton is indeed the former’s Victorian granddaughter. In Sir Willoughby Patterne, by all social criteria a very good marriage prospect, the potential horrors of a ‘suitable match’ are personified. He may be closer to General Tilney than Bluebeard but the annihilation of self he demands of Clara seems to her a fate worse than death. Willoughby’s attitude to women is part of a larger pattern of behaviour. The cumulative effect of instances of Willoughby’s economic hegemony is to persuade the reader that, far from being a retreat from the ‘real world’, Patterne Hall rather replicates it and distils it in a way which is defamiliarized and even shocking. The house he inhabits is, metaphorically, a social structure. His economic mastery is clearly demonstrated on several occasions: early in the novel, for example, he snubs his cousin, a Lieutenant of Marines, and sends him away empty handed without even seeing him when he has come to petition for money – because being dumpy and middle-aged, he does not fit Willoughby’s romanticized conception of what a marine should look like. This episode, which demonstrates Willoughby’s callousness, is described in terms of Gothic violence in the chapter heading as ‘a minor incident showing an hereditary aptitude in the use of the knife’ (E, p. 38). Of the lieutenant’s son, Crossjay, however, he would prefer to make a dependant, a kind of pet, depriving him (against the wishes of his cousin, Vernon Whitford) of the opportunity to earn his own living in the navy. Vernon himself is obligated to Willoughby for patronage in sustaining him in his career as a scholar; throughout the novel, he talks of freeing himself and earning his own living by the pen.47 There is also Flitch, the servant who has left Willoughby’s employment in an attempt to become his own master.

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Now impoverished and with nine children to support, he constantly petitions to be taken back and is regularly refused. He is treated comically in the narrative, but is for the reader a regular reminder of the unwavering loyalty demanded by Willoughby from those who come within the compass of his economic power. There is a telling juxtaposition when Clara’s first request to Willoughby to be set free from their engagement is interrupted by a sighting of Flitch: ‘. . . I am unworthy. I am volatile. I love my liberty, I want to be free . . .’ ‘Flitch!’ he called. It sounded necromantic. ‘Pardon me, my love,’ he said. ‘The man you see yonder violates my express injunction that he is not to come on my grounds, and here I find him on the borders of my garden!’ (E, p. 147) The parallel between Clara’s potential situation and that of Flitch is drawn; Flitch remains (literally, here) on the margins of Patterne Hall as an unsettling figure disrupting the master’s sense of well-being.48 The use of the word ‘necromantic’ adds a Gothic frisson to the incident and suggests an association with dark powers. Later in the novel, Laetitia Dale uses the language of vampirism to identify the dark predatory power of the Egoist: ‘men who are Egoists have good women for their victims; women on whose devoted constancy they feed; they drink it like blood’ (E, p. 206). In the course of the novel, Willoughby is revealed for what he is through the language of monstrosity. From being the darling of the county who ‘talks charmingly, dances divinely, rides with the air of a commander in chief’ (and in the words of the admiring Mrs Mounstuart Jenkinson ‘has a leg’) (E, p. 43), he becomes an object of ridicule who only just saves face by turning in the end, much chastened, to Laetitia Dale. Laetitia, a ‘faded young woman’ (E, p. 457) (in Willoughby’s view), at twenty-nine achieves her youthful dream of engagement to him. However, by this time she, like Clara, has identified him for the Egoist he is and she marries him with no romantic illusions at all, rather in the spirit of Pride and Prejudice’s Charlotte Lucas’s acceptance of the egregious Mr Collins. His nemesis remains comic; in the closing words of the novel: ‘He had the lady with brains! He had: and he was to learn the nature of that possession in the woman who is our wife’ (E, p. 597). The nature of Willoughby’s monstrosity is exposed through his courtship of Clara Middleton. Early on, the reader has been shown the foundation of Willoughby’s egoism: he wants the world to shape up

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to how he wants it to be and he has the power and money to enforce his stereotypes. In Clara Middleton, however, he meets his match. His uncomprehending response to Mrs Mountstuart’s judgement that she is a ‘dainty rogue in porcelain’ (E, p. 77) is related in the ironic words of the omniscient narrator: There was nothing of the rogue in himself, so there could be nothing of it in his bride. Elfishness, tricksiness, freakishness, were antipathetic to his nature; and he argued that it was impossible that he should have chosen for his complement a person deserving the title . . . his original conclusion that she was essentially feminine, in other words, a parasite and a chalice, Clara’s conduct confirmed from day to day. (E, p. 78) The failure to see Clara in terms other than these (terms sanctioned by the patriarchal discourse of the time) leads him to expect her not only to subordinate herself to his wishes but also to become subsumed into his identity, but he finds her ‘not docile’ (E, p. 81). An early clash of views comes when ‘he explained to his darling that lovers of necessity do loathe the world’ (E, p. 80) and her perception of him begins to shift so that his very handsomeness takes on an air of caricature when he disagrees with her: ‘Surprise, when he threw emphasis on it, stretched him with the tall eyebrows of a mask – limitless under the spell of caricature’ (E, p. 83). The comic spirit is demonstrated at work by the reference to her feeling herself ‘beset by a circle of imps’; by prompting this sense of an incipient grotesquerie, they indicate the potential of Gothic’s comic turn to be a liberating force. Shortly afterwards there follows Willoughby’s demand that she will be his ‘beyond death’, a truly Gothic sentence (E, p. 85). Such is the magnitude of his egoism that he cannot bear to envisage her seeking happiness without him and wishes to chain her to his memory. He confesses himself a man ‘haunted’ beset by ‘a ring of monkey faces grinning at me’; such is his lack of self knowledge that he assumes they are mocking him for his potential posthumous cuckolding. If they are indeed the comic imps, that is not the cause of their mockery. Clara’s growing distaste for, and then horror of, the liaison she finds herself in is conveyed through a series of Gothic tropes associated with imprisonment: To be chilled in subterranean sunlessness, without any substantial quality that she could grasp, only the mystery of the inefficient tallowlight in those caverns of the complacent-talking man; this appeared

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to her to be too extreme a probation for two or three weeks. How of a life-time of it! (E, p. 92) These images become more and more associated with the oppressiveness of physical proximity to Willoughby, who is prone to ‘silence her with manly smothering’ (E, p. 140): He enfolded her. Clara was growing hardened to it . . . What could she do? – she was caged; by her word of honour, as she one time thought; by her cowardice, at another; and dimly sensible that the latter was a stronger lock than the former, she mused on the abstract question whether a woman’s cowardice can be so absolute as to cast her into the jaws of aversion. (E, pp. 132–133) The last phrase of this quotation introduces another thread of Gothic imagery associated with Willoughby, one related to caricature. This is the progressive representation of the man himself as monstrous, often to comic effect: The gulf of a caress hove into view like an enormous billow hollowing under the curled ridge. She stooped to pick a buttercup; the monster swept by. (E, p. 171) The monstrosity and sense of imprisonment come together in Clara’s realization of the physical implications of marriage. She equates intimacy with Willoughby with the traditional ‘fate worse than death’, in which the sanctuary that is her chamber becomes a Gothic space: The sanctuary of her chamber, the pure white room so homely to her maidenly feelings, whispered peace, only to follow the whisper with that of another that went through her swelling to a roar, and leaving her as a string of music unkindly smitten. If she stayed in this house her chamber would no longer be a sanctuary. Dolorous bondage! Insolent death is not worse. Death’s worm we cannot keep away, but when he has us we are numb to dishonour, happily senseless. (E, p. 293) Repugnance at the thought of sexual relations with Willoughby is therefore expressed through an innuendo redolent of Gothic horror. Shortly afterwards, in the only part of the novel in which the action leaves Patterne Hall, Clara enacts the classic flight of the Gothic heroine.

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Bathetically, she only reaches the railway station and is persuaded to return by the man she will eventually marry, Vernon Whitford. The narrator indicates Clara’s state of mind through Gothic imagery: But all the doors are not open in a young lady’s consciousness, quick of nature though she may be: some are locked and keyless, some will not open to the key, some are defended by ghosts inside. (E, p. 335) Reflecting on her position, she thinks, ‘I am in a web. I cannot do right whatever I do’ (E, p. 333). The implication of this image of entrapment is that Willoughby is the spider, yet she also thinks ‘of sparing papa’ (E, p. 333). Clara is the daughter of a selfish and rootless academic, Dr Middleton. Unlike Sir Austin Feverel, he has no ‘system’ for his only child but is eager to be spared the continuing responsibility. In his own way he too is monstrously egoistic and like many of the fathers in Meredith’s fiction who neglect or abuse their parental duty he is bound up in his own concerns. On Clara’s return, he does not support her when she needs him; rather, in one of the most callous and selfish acts in literature, he trades her as a commodity to Willoughby in exchange for access to the Patterne wine cellar: ‘I have but a girl to give’ (E, p. 244) he says whilst freely imbibing the Patterne port.49 Clara reflects with disbelief on his behaviour: ‘What was there in this wine of great age which expelled reasonableness, fatherliness?’ (E, p. 292). Alcohol as currency of masculine exchange in a patriarchal society seals a deal in which Clara is the merchandise. Even the father of Laetitia Dale, the woman who has hoped in vain that Willoughby might marry her, is at best a nonentity and at worst a millstone for the daughter who must look after him. Significantly, both women are motherless. There are indications that Clara had inherited her spirited nature from her mother and a suggestion that Dr Middleton found the death of his wife something of a relief: ‘an amiable woman, of the poetical temperament nevertheless, too enthusiastic, imaginative, impulsive, for the repose of a sober scholar; an admirable woman, still, as you see, a woman, a firework’ (E, p. 237). Egoism, it seems, can take various forms and the Gothic father in this comic text abuses by selfishness rather than active cruelty. It is altogether essential that Clara must recognize the nature of Dr Middleton’s act; this and her identifying of Willoughby as an Egoist are the two most important developments of the novel. Only through this can she begin to articulate an alternative discourse which offers the possibility of freedom from patriarchal domination.

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Perhaps the most significant landmark in Clara’s struggle for freedom is to identify Willoughby for what he is and to be able to express it in language. Ironically, it is Willoughby himself who supplies the word,50 betraying himself as prime target of the comic spirit: “Beware of marrying an Egoist, my dear!” He bowed gallantly; and so blindly fatuous did he appear to her, that she could hardly believe him guilty of uttering the words she had heard from him, and kept her eyes on him vacantly till she came to a sudden full stop in the thoughts directing her gaze . . . this word was her medical herb, her illuminating lamp, the key of him . . . His generosity roared of I louder than the rest. (E, p. 137) The letter I bears an iconic relationship to the phallus; Willoughby’s I exercises dominion over the sphere of Patterne Hall.51 The narrator indulges in a long monologue on the question of how the love season requires women to act in response to the demands of the I, in which, like ‘thousands of civilized males’, he is required ‘to be dealt with by his betrothed as an original savage’: ‘To keep him in awe and hold him enchained, there are things she must never do, dare never say, must not think. She must be cloistral’ (E, p. 151). How is woman to extricate herself from a discourse that centres around this I? That is the central question of the novel. First, it would seem, she must recognize it. However, how to construct herself other than as an unprivileged term in the masculine/feminine binary of this discourse is far more problematical.52 There is, in effect, no language for it; Clara’s struggle to bring into language a construct of herself which frees her from definition in terms of Willoughby’s monstrous I is the struggle of all women in a phallogocentric culture. We rely on the narrator to voice her state of mind when, at the low point of her despair, Gothic oppression seems to come from all sides and she is imprisoned not only by social constraints but by an internalized sexual ideology that seems to permit no alternative voice to express her horror: (‘Language to express her peculiar repulsion eluded her’ [E, p. 493]). The Egoist sets the plot dynamic of the courtship novel in reverse: it begins with an engagement and tells the story of its undoing. The courtship plot is the plot of romantic love domesticated, assimilated to the requirements of civil society. Willoughby has the outward characteristics of a Home Counties romantic hero. He is also a reader of romantic novels and has constructed himself as the hero of one of them.

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When Clara is pleading with him for release he adopts the language of romantic fiction: ‘Clara one – one only – one last – one holy kiss! ‘If these poor lips, that were once sweet to you . . .’ The kiss, to continue the language of the imaginative compositions of his time, favourite reading which had inspired Willoughby with a colloquy so pathetic, was imprinted. (E, p. 279) At the end of the novel, when Clara has succeeded in achieving her freedom and Willoughby has saved face because Laetitia Dale has accepted him (on her terms), he is rewritten by the county ladies as the hero of a romance: ‘It is we who are in your debt for a lovely romance, my dear Sir Willoughby,’ said Lady Busshe, incapable of taking a correction, so thoroughly had he imbued her with his fiction, or with the belief that she had a good story to circulate. (E, p. 564) In a novel that Meredith himself thought might be too cerebral, there is a menacing sense of sexual threat conveyed by its Gothic imagery. ‘The leg’ identified by Mrs Mountstuart as a romantic attribute becomes a synecdoche signifying a kind of phallic arrogance on Willoughby’s part identified with the overweening ‘I’. For Clara it is the hand as synecdoche which becomes paramount as Dr Middleton attempts to keep her to her engagement in a scene which shows masculine authority over the female body. The exchange is worth quoting at some length: ‘It is cruel!’ said Clara. ‘That the owner of your hand should petition you for it?’ inquired her father. She sought refuge in a fit of tears. Willoughby bent above her, mute. ‘Is a scene that is hardly conceivable as a parent’s obligation once in a lustrum, to be repeated within the half hour?’ shouted her father. She drew up her shoulders and shook; let them fall and dropped her head. ‘My dearest! your hand!’ fluted Willoughby. The hand surrendered; it was much like the icicle of a sudden thaw. Willoughby squeezed it to his ribs. (E, pp. 486–487)

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A woman reader will readily empathize with the revulsion experienced by Clara here. In this context, the hand signifies more than casual social intercourse. In a literary context still constrained by Mudie’s, it may well signify even sexual intercourse itself.53 The phrase ‘hand in marriage’ embodies a synecdoche which has been naturalized in discourse. In this scene, it provides the focus for the coercion that is exercised over Clara’s body and by implication her whole future by these powerful men. Sexuality is a strong theme in The Egoist.54 Inevitably, because of its historical siting, the theme is expressed obliquely, and the problematizing of the signifiers of the body is one of the ways in which this happens. The experience of everyday life is thus in Meredith’s novel subjected to a comic use of Gothic discourse in a text that finally turns to the ending of comedy. Instead of marrying Willoughby, Clara jilts the owner of Patterne Hall and elects to follow a more liberated life with his intellectual cousin, Vernon Whitford; she is last seen enjoying the freedom of the Alps, away not only from the claustrophobic confines of the Hall, but from the shores of England itself. This comic closure, using the marriage convention, has been viewed negatively by some feminist critics as disappointing in its substitution of one man for another.55 The implication of The Egoist’s ending would seem to be that, as in the fiction of Jane Austen earlier in the century, the best a young woman could hope for was marriage to a suitable man. Given Clara’s situation as an uneducated young middle-class Englishwoman (she is only seventeen) that would certainly seem to be the case. Through the Gothic comic turn itself, however, the attitudes underlying that situation are laid bare, dissected and challenged. In 1879 the fin-de-siècle waited just over the horizon. Gothic was to surface in new forms and its own comic spirit was to manifest itself in other ways.

3 Towards Gothic Modernism

Both George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) focus on Paris as an arena in which identities in process can be played out. As a quintessentially ‘modern’ European city, Paris became, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, associated with metamorphosis and experimentation. It is thus an appropriate setting for the plots of these two novels which, in their depiction of gender, national identity, urban space and a godless world, indicate a movement into the late phase of modernity. However, whereas du Maurier’s text anticipates the vital importance of such issues for the twentieth century (despite setting them back in time in the 1850s), Barnes’s novel deals with their outcome on the eve of the Second World War. Both texts use Gothic tropes and devices to represent the anxieties associated with twentieth-century Europe; both use the comic Gothic turn as a means of engaging with such anxieties in a more ambivalent manner than ‘horror’ Gothic; both are written on the cusp of important social, political and cultural historical moments; both present the city space as a place of liberation in its embrace of the flâneur and the bohemian. Nevertheless, they are also very different in several ways. Whereas du Maurier’s novel gives us an authoritative narrator and a leisurely linear narrative divided into eight parts, Barnes’s work is formally experimental in a recognizably Modernist manner, using several narrators whose perceptions of the world overlap, confirm and contradict each other. Moreover, in Nightwood the characters’ dreams open up the unconscious as a place of significant meaning; in Trilby, however, the portrayal of mesmerism suggests anxiety about the permeability of the boundary between the conscious mind and the unconscious. In addition, these novels handle the Gothic comic turn in rather different ways. The first few sections of Trilby jauntily give the reader a bohemian world in 69

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which hybridity, sexual ambiguity and unorthodoxy are comically presented as intriguing and liberating. The only sinister element in this part of the novel is Svengali. A variation on the Gothic figure of the Wandering Jew, he is presented as alien and – true to the anti-Semitic stereotype – as exotic, talented, grubby and having black, beady eyes. However, this caricatural representation of Svengali verges on the parodic rather than the terrifying; it is, as Neil Davidson suggests, ‘a pacifying, palatable affirmation’ of certain assumptions about ‘the Jew’ common in the nineteenth century.1 Svengali is thus not at this stage of the novel a deeply threatening figure since his uncanniness is presented as entertaining and essentially containable. This comic perspective cannot be sustained though and, from the end of Part Three, Svengali is presented as dangerous and degenerate; moreover, the world of the novel becomes increasingly marked by loss and death, despite the rather forced light-heartedness of the novel’s narrator. In contrast, Nightwood begins darkly, with the birth in 1880 of Felix, whose father, Guido Volkbein, ‘a Jew of Italian descent’,2 has recently died and whose mother dies shortly after giving him life. Within a few paragraphs we are reminded of the early persecution of the Jews and their suffering in modern Europe: Then walking in the Prater he had been seen carrying in a conspicuously clenched fist the exquisite handerchief of yellow and black linen that cried aloud of the ordinance of 1468, issued by one Pietro Barbo, demanding that, with a rope about its neck, Guido’s race should run in the Corso for the amusement of the Christian populace, while ladies of noble birth, sitting upon spines too refined for rest, arose from their seats, and, with the red-gowned cardinals and the Monsignori, applauded with that cold yet hysterical abandon of a people that is at once unjust and happy, the very Pope himself shaken down from his hold on heaven with the laughter of a man who forgoes his angels that he may recapture the beast. (N, pp. 12–13) The stage is set, in fact, for the rise of fascism – which is what the novel, in its oblique and baroque Gothic manner, portrays.3 Yet, in the characters of Robin Vote and Matthew O’Connor, Nightwood manages to take a comic turn that anticipates how the breakdown of rigid gender and national identities might lead to a more liberal climate within Europe. In this chapter, then, we aim to explore the tensions within and between two novels that could be described as ‘ambiguous Gothic’, in

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that both texts deal with uncomfortable issues for many readers and both use the Gothic and the Comic Turn to do so.4 George du Maurier’s Trilby was one of the most popular novels of the fin-de-siècle, particularly in America. It aroused more interest and excitement in the 1890s than did Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the stage version even lending its title to a particular sort of hat. Its popularity at this time probably owed much to the fact that it drew on three topics of immense fascination to British and American readers in the second half of the nineteenth century: the divided self, bohemia and mesmerism.5 While Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) dramatizes a self split between respectable scientist and marauding murderer, Trilby plays out the doppelgänger motif in a minor key, splitting ‘the dandy-aesthete, embodying certain idealized artistic traits within the sensitive English gentleman, while imposing less desirable components onto a Jewish genius’.6 Indeed, in its first few sections it takes a jovially relaxed and humorous view of metamorphosis, change and hybridity – although Gecko’s claim, at the end of the novel, that ‘There were two Trilbys’,7 reminds us of the novel’s Gothic legacy in this respect and of how Trilby is finally torn apart – albeit in a less literal manner than Hoffmann’s Olympia – by two conflicting constructions of herself. And while the novel’s more serious counterpart, Dracula, drew quite clearly on a history of literary vampirism to create a fiction which would identify itself with the Gothic tradition in its exploration of horror, Trilby’s relationship with such a tradition is much more ambiguous.8 Indeed, it was received as an intriguing novel, rather than a horrifying one, one reviewer describing it as ‘this charming story’.9 Moreover, the novel’s anti-Semitic portrayal of a Jewish musician was, at the time, probably seen as an extension of what Daniel Pick describes as the ‘light-hearted teasing manner’ in which Jews were frequently portrayed in Punch.10 (Undoubtedly, du Maurier’s reputation as a satirical cartoonist for Punch would have predisposed the reader to expect amusement rather than horror.) In addition, Trilby was much admired for its elaborate and loving portraits of bohemian life among the artists of mid-century Paris.11 As Mary Russo has remarked: By the late nineteenth century the perceived degradation and dangers of the Bohemian lifestyle were greatly idealized to produce a refurnished and cleaner Bohemia, available as a ‘self-chosen subculture’, now only ‘loosely associated with marginality, youth, poverty, devotion to art, a shifting set of rebellious behaviors and attitudes’.12

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Closely associated with art and bohemia, the city space of Paris is presented during the first part of Trilby as a place of experimentation and liberty where those gifted with imagination, talent and courage can find more authentic selves. Du Maurier’s Paris allows his characters a temporary escape, via a bohemian existence, from the restrictive British gender codes and bourgeois mores that will eventually bear down on them. It is presented light-heartedly as a space of play for the three British artists and it rings with the promise of freedom. This freedom is, however, more readily available to men than women of a certain class or outsiders, including Jews; indeed, Svengali is kept firmly on the edge of this liberal society. However, for the first part of the novel Svengali is not a dangerous figure and, in contrast with the strong hermeneutic code in evidence in many Gothic texts, including Dracula, much of the narrative of the novel is given over to leisurely exposition and elaborate descriptive detail. Over-representation, especially in relation to the three young British artists living in the city (nicknamed Little Billee, Taffy and the Laird), inevitably involves caricature and provokes comic effect. The anonymous narrator is a ‘sensible’ Englishman who preserves a degree of detachment: the focalization of the narrative thus always keeps the uncanny in the distance. Trilby’s masculine attire and androgynous presence are by no means threatening; rather they function to liberate Little Billee from a restrictive British code of masculinity and allow him to express his ‘feminine’ sensibilities. For the three male artists, then, Paris is initially a place of innocent fun. Much of Trilby is devoted to lengthy descriptive interludes portraying Little Billee’s enjoyment of his Parisian bohemian existence which he shares with Taffy and the Laird, described by Elaine Showalter as two ‘amiable hacks’13 and by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as ‘two older, bigger, more virile English artists whom he loves deeply’.14 Sedgwick sees du Maurier’s portrayal of this household as an example of what she calls ‘homosexual panic’.15 However, the tone in these episodes in Trilby is insistently hearty, more reminiscent, for a modern reader, of Rupert Bear than Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: ‘he [Little Billee] looked at his two friends, and wondered if any one, living or dead, had ever had such a glorious pair of chums as these’ (T, p. 5). The term ‘paranoid Gothic’ coined by Sedgwick to denote late nineteenth-century texts such as Trilby, which enact homosexual panic through their endorsement of this bachelor life of ‘sexual anaesthesia’, does not quite take account of the comic strategies used to represent bohemian bachelordom. For Little Billee’s ‘virile’ companions are described in comic terms. Taffy sports ‘an immense pair of drooping auburn whiskers, of the kind that used to be

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called Piccadilly weepers’, a description of dedication to fashion that might make him a suitable character for the pages of P.G. Wodehouse. Sandy the Laird of Cockpen (Scottish, though for the purposes of the novel an honorary Englishman) paints pictures of toreadors, with the aid of ‘a complete toreador’s kit’ and a hired guitar, although he has never been to Spain (T, p. 3). These three friends find a kind of metropolitan utopia in the Paris of the 1850s and experience their happiest times there: Talking, talking, talking; such happy talk! As full of sanguine hope and enthusiasm, of cocksure commendation or condemnation of all painters, dead or alive, of modest but firm belief in themselves and each other, as a Paris Easter-egg is full of sweets and pleasantness (for the young). (T, p. 21) Little Billee, a distinctively effeminate figure, is ‘small and slender’ with ‘a straight white forehead veined with blue, large dark blue eyes, delicate regular features, and coal black hair’ (T, p. 4). It is no coincidence that it is he who is proved to have the genuine artistic talent, becoming as he grows older the successful artist, William Bagot, while the other two have less illustrious futures ahead of them. Thus inscribed upon Little Billee are the fears of the potentially emasculating effects of artistry – particularly artistry hatched abroad. His fate is a sad and early death, of course, but the responsibility for this is displaced onto Svengali through the latter’s apparently unnatural influence upon Trilby. Little Billee, who appears in many ways to be the antithesis of Svengali, is described as having a ‘winning and handsome face’ that carries ‘just a faint suggestion of some possible very remote Jewish ancestor’. The import of this suggestion is, however, immediately translated into a comic vein by a characteristic burst of verbosity that compares the trace of Jewish blood with ‘the dry white Spanish wine called montijo, which is not meant to be taken pure’ and ‘the famous bulldog strain, which is not beautiful in itself’. These, it is suggested, improve the quality of sherry and greyhounds respectively or so, the narrator claims, he has been told by ‘wine merchants and dog-fanciers – the most veracious persons that can be’ (T, p. 4). Such flippancy and bathos are typical strategies of the novel; there is a persistent turning away from the most disturbing possibilities that the text raises. Svengali and Little Billee, it is suggested, might both derive their artistic sensibility from their Jewish blood but the former is protected from the excess of ‘Jewishness’ not only by the dilution of that blood by a much greater element of

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‘Englishness’ but also by his homosocial bonding with his fellow British artists in Paris. The element of ‘Jewishness’ in Little Billee, then, is ringed round with ambivalence. Like a measure of a lethal substance, it is homeopathic in small quantities but fatal in large doses. It contributes something valuable to a complex European identity that, by implication, protects against death of the soul by English provincialism: Fortunately for the world, and especially for ourselves, most of us have in our veins at least a minim of that precious fluid, whether we know it or show it or not. Tant pis pour les autres! (T, p. 4) Yet, Englishness is frequently presented in the novel as the highest state: for example, Trilby is at one point described as growing ‘more English every day; and that was a good thing’ (T, p. 52). The Gothic Other is the uncanny foreigner but also an aspect of the self; our hero is British and European but also – and not least – English. The ambiguity with which national identity and ‘race’ are handled in the novel is matched by its ambiguous representation of gender. Against the diminutive and almost translucent figure of Little Billee, Trilby is a powerful physical presence, ‘a tall and fully-developed young female’ who ‘would have made a singularly handsome boy’ (T, p. 9). The tendency of the text to indulge in excessive description is well exemplified by the references to Trilby’s ‘astonishingly beautiful feet’ (T, p. 10) that are the topic of passages of lyrical prose and become the subject of some of the novel’s florid comic philosophical reflections.16 For the first third of the novel, Trilby’s status as both subject and object is presented amusingly, although later it becomes increasingly problematic. For Little Billee she is either a perfect foot or a ‘beautiful white English bosom’ (T, p. 100); for Svengali she is a voice and a mouth (‘“Himmel! The roof of your mouth is like the dome of the Panthéon . . .’ [T, p. 41]). Through the eyes of the male characters she is fragmented into aesthetic pieces in the best tradition of western classical art: Along the walls, at a great height, ran a broad shelf, on which were other casts in plaster, terracotta, imitation bronze . . . an anatomical figure of a horse, with only one leg left and no ears; a horse’s head from the pediment of the Parthenon, earless also; and the bust of Clytie, with her beautiful low brow . . . and the ineffable forward shrug of her dear shoulders that makes her bosom as a nest, a rest, a pillow, a refuge . . . (T, pp. 1–2)

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The obsessiveness and fetishism implicit in the male artist’s appropriation of Trilby’s body are, however, rendered comical for much of the novel and critique implicitly both the artist and the artistic traditions.17 Gothic shadows only appear when Svengali begins to control Trilby through mesmerism so that her subjectivity is completely transformed and her whole self objectified. Significantly, perhaps, at this point of the novel Svengali seems to grow in stature, and is described as ‘handsome and tall and commanding’ (T, p. 186), assuming heroic proportions as he is seen to discipline a woman whose independent will and androgynous spirit might have threatened traditional masculinity. Despite the foregrounding of her feet as objects of great female beauty, Trilby’s own gender identity is very ambiguous in that her very physicality is somehow masculine. Her size makes her physically dominant (and indeed du Maurier’s illustrations depict her as towering over almost everyone, not merely Little Billee). She is first seen in male attire: those exquisite feet are encased in ‘a huge pair of male slippers’ and she is wearing ‘the gray overcoat of a French infantry soldier’ in the pocket of which she keeps the equipment for rolling her own cigarettes (T, p. 9). She is nominally ‘English’ but the daughter of an expatriate Scottish mother (of humble and illegitimate birth) and her inebriate academic Irish husband. She is thus represented as a hybrid figure. Like du Maurier himself, she speaks in this macaronic text both English and fluent colloquial Parisian French. Uninhibited by English bourgeois constructions of femininity and ‘ladylike’ behaviour, she is much in demand to model for ‘the figure’, although – until Svengali takes her in hand – there is no possibility of her becoming an artist, given her gender and class.18 The tension between the bourgeois and the bohemian sides of Little Billee is exposed during the episode when he intrudes upon her modelling in an artist’s studio and is deeply shocked. Her love for him and desire to conform to his expectations causes her to give up this lucrative and enjoyable activity. She then earns her living as a blanchisseuse de fin (a rather superior laundress) and begins to make herself useful in a Wendy-like manner to the ‘lost boys’ of the English ‘ménage à trois’, thus attempting to adapt herself to the pattern of bourgeois femininity that Little Billee finds acceptable. Little Billee’s attitude to her remains ambivalent throughout the novel. Fascinated by her exotic qualities and idiosyncrasies, he nonetheless wishes her to fit into his preconceptions of respectable femininity. The incongruities occasioned by this ambivalence are marked by a certain comic pathos:

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and the longing was a longing that Trilby could be turned into a young lady – say the vicar’s daughter in a little Devonshire village – his sister’s friend and co-teacher at the Sunday-school, a simple, pure and pious maiden of gentle birth. (T, p. 26) A desire, in other words, that Trilby might become all that she is not; that she become, metaphorically, cut down to a manageable size. Thus he shies away from acknowledging the implications of his love for this androgynous and sexually free spirit. Consequently, Little Billee fails to challenge his mother’s firm conviction that Trilby is ‘unsuitable’ for her son – a failure that results in Trilby’s flight from bohemia. This is how Little Billee loses his love: it is sacrificed to upper middle-class standards and conventional ideas about sexual identity rather than to the depredations of a monstrous gothic figure. It is only after her rejection and the death of her beloved younger brother that Trilby turns to the protection of Svengali. Little Billee has already disappeared from her life. Thus the dynamic of realism plays a very significant part in the tragedy of Trilby. However, the increasingly powerful role and negative representation of Svengali in the novel – from the point at which Little Billee capitulates to his mother’s pressure not to pursue Trilby – results from the displacement of certain anxieties onto the Jewish Other, so that Svengali becomes, in effect, a scapegoat figure. During their time together as bohemian companions, there is shared respect and affection between the three young British artists and Trilby, despite the artists’ occasional anxieties about the latter’s status and respectability as a lone woman in Paris. Once Little Billee fails to claim Trilby for his wife, however, her fortunes take a turn for the worse and Svengali manages to insinuate himself into her life. He not only mesmerically takes her under his control, turning her into a world-famous singer, but also presents her as his wife (although we learn later that he already has a wife and three children in another country). This bohemian, unconventional, rather androgynous young woman is, then, ‘tamed’ by a racial and cultural Other. This allows du Maurier to avoid facing certain implications raised by the plot – for, from the bohemian perspective, the marriage of Trilby would have been a reactionary move (depriving her of her freedom and cutting her down to suitable domestic size); from the bourgeois perspective, however, Little Billee’s marriage would have been a radical decision (in his choosing a not wholly ‘respectable’ woman against the advice of relations). In order to evade this conundrum, the taming of Trilby is displaced onto Svengali and the difficult issue of how to absorb

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the New Woman (for that is what Trilby represents, despite the novel’s historical setting) into conventional society is thus avoided. She might sing like a diva and draw crowds to the opera halls of Europe, but what her voice signals is a retrieval and sentimental validation of femininity as associated with nature, nurturing and infantilization. For, in contrast to the undisciplined and gender-free voice she possessed previously, the voice of ‘La Svengali’ resonates through ‘that huge hall, Le Cirque des Bashibazoucks’ in Paris (T, p. 172) as the voice of femininity: She sang the verse a second time, with but little added expression and no louder; but with a sort of breathy widening of her voice that made it like a broad heavenly smile of universal motherhood turned into sound . . . Waves of sweet and tender laughter, the very heart and essence of innocent, high-spirited girlhood, alive to all that is simple and joyous and elementary in nature – the freshness of the morning, the ripple of the stream, the click of the mill, the lisp of the wind in the trees, the song of the lark in the cloudless sky – the sun and the dew, the scent of early flowers and summer woods and meadows – the sight of birds and bees and butterflies and frolicsome young animals at play – all the sights and scents and sounds that are the birthright of happy children, happy savages in favoured climes – things within the remembrance and reach of most of us! (T, pp. 176, 182) Trilby’s sexuality (for, ‘married’ to Svengali, she can no longer follow ‘love for love’s sake only’ [T, p. 29] as she once did) and her intellect (‘she was a very intelligent person . . . and most ambitious to learn’ [T, p. 52]) are excised from her personality once she is under Svengali’s spell. Instead, her voice renders her representative of all that the Victorian period associated with an idealized femininity. Indeed, in her heavily mesmerized state, Trilby recalls Olympia of Hoffman’s tale: they both become automata and men are thus able to project onto them whatever they wish. Just as Nathanael projects into the blank eyes of Olympia the unquestioning feminine adoration he desires, so Svengali (and by implication the three male artists) projects onto ‘La Svengali’ his own emotional needs. As Gecko notes: He had but to say ‘Dors!’ and she suddenly became an unconscious Trilby of marble, who could produce wonderful sounds – just the sounds he wanted, and nothing else – and think his thoughts and wish his wishes – and love him at his bidding with a strange, unreal,

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factitious love . . . just his own love for himself turned inside out – à l’envers – and reflected back on him, as from a mirror . . . un echo, un simulacre, quoi! Pas autre chose! . . . (T, p. 253) Just as Meredith’s Sir Willoughby Patterne finds ‘the man he sought there’,19 deep in the eyes of Laetitia Dale, so Svengali – reviled and despised by many – finds unconditional love in the eyes of the mesmerized Trilby. And just as the narrator in Hoffman’s tale informs the reader ‘that it was generally considered an unwarrantable fraud to palm off on level-headed tea parties (Olympia had shone at several) a wooden doll instead of a living person’;20 so Trilby becomes a woman of marble, a simulacrum, rather than a living person, an instrument upon which only Svengali can play.21 (Interestingly, as Daniel Pick points out, the 1955 film version of Trilby linked Svengali to ‘Coppola’ in what was obviously a recognition of Hoffmann’s legacy in this respect.22) By this point of the novel, then, we have entered a more sinister Gothic world which features entrapments, split selves, illness, ‘brain fevers’, deaths and the début of a Gothic monster. Until this moment, Svengali has been presented in a highly ambiguous, often comic manner and, indeed, linked heavily with Little Billee. Their pairing is made not only through ‘Jewishness’, but also through their obsession with Trilby, their secularity and their artistic abilities (Little Billee’s ‘touch on either canvas or paper was like Svengali’s on the keyboard – unique’ [T, p. 45], we are told). In this respect Svengali also represents another dimension of ‘Jewishness’, that of the ‘acculturated Jew’ identified by Brian Cheyette as a feature of post-Arnoldian discourse.23 This point is also made by Elaine Showalter in her introduction to the edition of Trilby in the Oxford Popular Fiction Series: ‘Jewish blood, to use the peculiar finde-siècle and Darwinian inflection of du Maurier’s text, carries genius’.24 On the other hand, Svengali’s negative qualities – which include cynicism, malice, narcissism, manipulativeness, conceit, a tendency to bully and a lack of personal hygiene – are fully expounded, but in the first three parts of the novel these disturbing aspects of his character are somewhat neutralized by being presented in a comic, caricatural spirit. Indeed, at this point, Svengali seems to have more in common with Barrie’s Captain Hook (who first appeared on stage in 1904) than with Dracula, that other memorable agent of Otherness to emerge during the 1890s.25 It is, of course, Svengali’s uncanny mesmeric power over Trilby that is the problem since it suggests both supernatural possibilities and a fear of the dissolution of the boundary between the conscious and the

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unconscious self and between one mind and another – and, indeed, between the Jew and the non-Jew. In this respect, Svengali’s ability to hypnotize gentiles betrays a growing European nervousness about the power of Jewry; furthermore, his role as ‘effeminized artificer’, to use Neil R. Davison’s phrase, associates him with a degenerative masculinity.26 In 1894, the year in which Trilby was published, this antipathy towards ‘the Jew’ manifested itself clearly in France via the Dreyfus affair, discussion of which was marked by the same racial-gender assumptions.27 However, the narrative strategies of Trilby ensure that these fears are contained and not properly confronted; the reader thus never experiences full Gothic horror. Unlike Dracula, Svengali is seen, finally, as a product of this world. However, he shares with that undead counterpart certain characteristics. He too originates from Eastern Europe, ‘poisonous East – birthplace and home of an ill wind that blows nobody good’ (T, p. 239). A number of critics have noted that Dracula carries certain markers of ‘Jewishness’. For example, Ken Gelder’s discussion of Dracula’s ‘Jewish’ characteristics takes up the similarities observed between Dracula and Svengali by both Nina Auerbach and Jules Zanger.28 Judith Halberstam also makes the connection between Dracula and ‘Jewishness’, but notes that the equation should not be seen in a simple linear manner.29 Instead she argues that ‘Gothic monsters . . . transform the fragments of otherness into one body. That body is not female, not Jewish, not homosexual but it bears the mark of the construction of femininity, race, and sexuality.’30 However, Svengali does not fit this paradigm of the ‘Gothic monster’; the novel does not project these ‘fragments of otherness’ onto one body, dispersing them instead across several characters, as we have seen. At first sight Svengali appears to be a direct descendant of Dickens’s Fagin, in that du Maurier gives an exaggerated anti-Semitic portrait of a ‘tall bony’ man who is ‘well-featured but sinister’ (T, p. 7) and whose ‘tawny black eyes’ emit a ‘very ugly gleam’ (T, p. 130).31 Yet the grotesqueness of this portrait is initially modified by ridicule: in mocking his heavily accented speech the narrator turns him into a figure of farce, for example, and the description of his reluctant washing habits seems more appropriate to a schoolboy than a Gothic monster: twisting the corner of his pocket handkerchief round his dirty forefinger, he delicately dipped it, and removed the offending stains. His fingers, he thought, would do very well for another day or two as they were . . . (T, p. 37)

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As his power over Trilby grows, however, he is represented more negatively and compared to a ‘demon’ who ‘oppressed and weighed’ on Trilby ‘like an incubus’ (T, p. 75). In this respect, his charismatic hold over Trilby functions in opposition to Little Billee’s ‘innocent’ love for her; it also allows du Maurier to displace the cultural expectation that an Englishman should exercise control over the woman he loves onto a manipulative Other. Both, however, see her as object rather than subject. Yet du Maurier’s text presents Trilby as multi-faceted: as a woman of the street, Muse for aspiring male artists, high-class washerwoman and great diva – in such a way as to illustrate ‘the division and fragmentation of the modern subject . . . the terrifying and exhilarating otherness of modern experience’.32 The novel thus indicates the turning point of a Victorian ideal; it was, after all, written during a decade when the New Woman was demanding the Vote as well as access to higher education and changes in the law. Such a woman would be easier to handle under hypnosis, as Elaine Showalter has pointed out: three men lean hungrily over three mesmerized and apparently characterless women whose wills are suspended by those of the magus/master. The looming men are Svengali, Dracula and Freud; the lushly helpless women are Trilby O’Ferrall, Lucy Westenra, and (as Freud calls her) ‘Frau Emmy von N., age 40, from Livonia’.33 Trilby is, indeed, finally rendered ‘lushly helpless’ by Svengali; she becomes another Olympia, an automaton, created by Svengali with the aid of Gecko. Indeed, La Svengali’s ensuing loss of her singing voice and the doctor’s description of her ‘insanity’ (T, p. 222) echo the perception by Hoffmann’s characters of Olympia’s ‘rigid stiffness and muteness’ as signs of ‘total idiocy’ (‘The Sandman’, p. 63). Trilby’s ‘Klara’ self – that intelligent and imaginative woman who was ‘gay, carefree, childlike’ (‘The Sandman’, p. 51) – has disappeared. Her younger, more androgynous self has been replaced by a woman who exists in order to embody the dreams of most men: ‘a broad heavenly smile of universal motherhood turned into sound’ (T, p. 176). Her voice, as we have seen, indicates that the Victorian tendency to idealize and sentimentalize women is still potent in the last decade of the nineteenth century, despite an excited engagement with the New Woman. Trilby might sing like a diva but her spirit, autonomy and independence have been vanquished: first by Little Billee’s capitulation to his mother’s wishes, then by the tragedy of her brother’s death, then by Svengali’s insidious manipulation of both her plight and her voice. After the death of Svengali, bereft of her

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musical powers, she is recuperated into bourgeois respectability as she descends into a terminal decline. In focussing so strongly on the figure of Svengali, critics have frequently ignored the complex role played by Trilby in the novel; Mrs Bagot is not the only one to push this interesting female character to the side of her own story.34 The polarization of woman between doll/automaton and intelligent independent being which we see in Hoffmann’s tale of 1817 thus echoes down the century and is repeated melodramatically in du Maurier’s best-seller of the 1890s. The concerns of Trilby are those of this world, not of the next. Although most readers remember Svengali’s powers as uncanny (and, indeed, Little Billee sometimes experiences them in such a way), the text in fact undermines any belief in transcendence or the supernatural in the same way that Little Billee, taking Darwin’s Origin of Species as his bible, dismisses any notion of God. Whereas Dracula, for example, can be destroyed only through the dedicated campaign of ‘the Crew of Light’, to whose astonishment he ‘crumbled into dust and passed from our sight’,35 Svengali expires from nothing more uncanny than a heart attack. Whatever his mesmeric powers, there is never any doubt that Svengali is mortal. Moreover, near the end of the novel, Gecko reveals that La Svengali’s wonderful voice was not the product of an uncanny intervention, but the result of hours of training: ‘“Well, we both taught her together – for three years – morning, noon, and night – six – eight hours a day . . . we taught her to make the sounds – and then how to use them”’ (T, p. 251). The ‘supernatural’ nature of Svengali’s powers, then, is undermined by other aspects of the text. The novel’s use of ‘ambiguous’ Gothic thus reflects a fin-de-siècle ambivalence about many subjects: the changing role of woman; the boundary between femininity and masculinity; the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious; the role of the artist – for whether it be the painting of Little Billee or the musical talent of Svengali, art is seen as both desirable and dangerous. The aesthetic impulse is Otherized and demonized in the text through the figure of the Jewish Svengali; the genuine artistic talent of Little Billee is associated not only with a tinge of ‘Jewishness’ but also with a degree of feminization.36 The Englishman’s vulnerability to what Svengali represents is displaced at the level of plot onto Trilby, herself a hybrid figure whose gender characteristics do not conform to Victorian English notions of femininity. It is she who is ‘taken over’ by an ‘alien’ consciousness, yet it is the removal of Svengali’s influence which sends her into her terminal decline. Little Billee’s masculinity is apparently shored up through his identification with the hearty ‘chums’ of his bachelor establishment, a representation that is strenuous in its

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gaiety and comic piquancy. Such forced jollity suggests a determination to sustain the novel as comic but this slowly collapses as shades of the bourgeois world close in on the growing boy. Indeed, du Maurier’s novel places itself in the tradition of Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Barrett’s The Heroine in suggesting that the truly destructive forces may lie in the ‘real’ world rather than in the supernatural. Whereas the removal of Svengali’s influence sends Trilby into her terminal decline, Little Billee is sent into his by Trilby’s death. However, at the level of plot, he has lost Trilby long before as a result of his mother’s intervention in the name of propriety. In losing Trilby, he also loses his artistic integrity and capitulates to the market-place, spending the proceeds on pretty gifts for his mother and sister: for Little Billee (I much grieve to say it of a hero of romance) was an excellent man of business. That infinitesimal dose of the good old Oriental blood kept him straight, and not only made him stick to his last through thick and thin, but also to those whose foot his last was found to match (for he couldn’t or wouldn’t alter his last). (T, pp. 129–130) In this respect, his trajectory resembles that of Svengali, who exploits Trilby’s voice and body for commercial gain, a representation that reinforces the stereotype of ‘the Jew’ as driven more by love of money than by love of art. But place plays its part in this trajectory too: whereas Paris brought hybridity and freedom, return to England brings respectability and dulling wealth. It is bourgeois propriety that seems to be the true villain of this novel. Paradoxically, however, the plot appears to endorse the bourgeois ideal of married happiness in its closure. The closing scenes of the novel take place, echoing Dumas’ musketeers, vingt ans après. This acts as a distancing device and the events of twenty years later suggest a quiet domestic happiness for those who are left, most notably Little Billee’s sister, Blanche, and Taffy Wynne. Theirs is a rather mundane love story consisting of many years of contented married life. Although their relationship is described as having begun ‘by Little Billee’s bedside’ (T, p. 244), there is a refusal to engage at any emotional level with the tragic fate of Little Billee’s prolonged decline and death. These are not directly narrated as ‘there had been too much sickness in this story’; there is only a reference to ‘his manly, calm and most beautiful surrender – the wedding of the moth with the star, of the night with the morrow’ (T, pp. 243–244). Such a description expresses the ambivalence

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of the text. In the process of containing the tragedy of Little Billee’s death within one sentence and turning to happier matters, the very language of that sentence invokes the dissolution of boundaries in the language of aestheticism. It also deflects the possibilities of heterosexual union onto a more transcendental consummation, just as intimations of homosexuality have been deflected through the novel’s emphasis on a convivial homosociality. Du Maurier’s vision is, then, entirely secular.37 Unlike Dracula, Trilby never acknowledges any dissolution of the boundary between life and death except at one key destabilizing moment. Trilby’s death occurs shortly after she receives a photograph of Svengali ‘out of the mysterious east’ (T, p. 239). The effect of this photograph is to mesmerize her, producing her very last performance; his very gaze, even in simulacrum, it is implied, may have this effect. Elaine Showalter has pointed out that ‘Trilby is . . . packed with direct and oblique references to eyes, insight, blindness, and vision . . .’;38 it is no coincidence that du Maurier himself suffered from failing eyesight and a deep anxiety that he might be overtaken by blindness. Indeed, his turning to fiction in the 1890s was partly a result of failing vision that put his career as an artist in jeopardy. In giving Svengali the power to influence others by the power of his eye, he might have been expressing his own deep anxieties about his ability to function as an artist at the practical level as well as broader cultural anxieties about the role and identity of the artist. In addition, as Daniel Pick has suggested, ‘Trilby is also preoccupied – and not so long after Freud had distanced himself from Charcot’s way of seeing – with the power and defects of vision, including our tendency to “see” merely the stereotypes we expect.’39 There may even be a touch of envious identification with Svengali – hence, perhaps, the text’s ambiguous representation of him (both an artistic genius and artistically limited; both handsome and abhorrent). However, unlike Dracula, Svengali does not at the level of plot represent a dark and uncanny force which is defeated by the forces of light. Nor does his demise fortify the boundaries between life and death, good and evil. Rather, in Trilby it is the bohemian and artistic life that is rejected at the level of plot while simultaneously remaining an object of desire. However much the Wynnes’ ‘useful, humdrum, happy domestic existence’ is endorsed by the narrator, the novel ends on a note of ambivalence: the description of their married rural bliss has a postscript, ‘we can do with so little down here . . .’ (T, p. 256). For some readers, the cosy tedium of the Wynne marriage that produces three fine sons might be seen less as comic closure and more as enduring nightmare. It certainly resonates

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rather disturbingly with Klara’s fate – that of happiness with ‘a loving husband in front of the door of a beautiful country house, with two lively boys playing beside them’ (‘The Sandman’, p. 72). In this respect, both Hoffmann’s and du Maurier’s texts deliver a sentimentalized image of ‘normality’ that represents a retreat from the problems that the text has raised in relation to the subject’s evolution during late modernity. It is, then, the city – rather than the country – which provides a measure of authenticity for the novel’s three young men from Britain. It gives them the space to experiment with bohemian liberty, gender flexibility and freedom from conventional mores. The countryside closes down options and leads to death by cultural assimilation. It is in the city, in the 1890s, that one confronts most obviously the Other in the self: the stranger; the Jew; the continental other; the atheist; the artist; the bohemian; the transgressor – although in du Maurier’s novel these exciting confrontations are all displaced onto an earlier time (‘The fin-de-siècle reader, disgusted at the thought of such an orgy as I have been trying to describe, must remember that it happened in the fifties . . .’ [T, p. 97]). To retreat to the countryside is to retreat to those certainties represented by the values of ‘a respectably-brought-up young Briton of the higher middle class’ (T, p. 86) so eulogized by the novel’s narrator. They lead, however, to the death of the soul and are incompatible with art, change and progress. Trilby, then, engages with several vital challenges that emerged during the nineteenth century: with atheism (Little Billee’s ‘modernity’ and ‘its dreary scepticism’ [T, p. 151] are represented by his defence of Darwin’s The Origin of Species to his future father-in-law, a parson); with the excitement of the New Woman (Trilby’s Junoesque pre-Raphaelite proportions and her unconventional behaviour foreshadow a ‘type [that] would be infinitely more admired now than in the fifties’ [T, p. 73]); with the foreign Other (Svengali is described not only as an ‘Oriental Israelite Hebrew Jew’ [T, p. 205] but also as Austrian and German and as having a Polish mother – a highly gifted man he is, like Conrad’s Kurtz, the product of all Europe); with the richness and the threat posed by miscegenation and hybridity. The novel’s final validation of upper middle-class Britishness as the most sensible way to live is somewhat undermined by the fate of the British characters recuperated into it. It is, then, like many of the novels we examine in this book, a deeply ambivalent text, written on the cusp of change. It is not, however, able to sustain its early comic vision of hybridity and becomes a dark drama of possession and dispossession, anticipating, perhaps, many of the troubles that were to face twentiethcentury Europe.

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However, the verbal brio and excess with which du Maurier describes Parisian life in the 1850s imprints quite firmly in the reader’s mind an imagined alternative world where a bohemian lifestyle produces a relaxed milieu in which women can be bigger than men and men can be more fragile than women. In Daniel Pick’s words: In short his books were not written as prosaic political diatribes, nor as radical propaganda exercises, of which there was no shortage in the 1890s, but as dreamy, bitter-sweet evocations of other worlds of human possibility, beyond the reach of humdrum, quotidian certainties.40 The tensions and contradictions within the novel thus reflect many of the ambivalences and desires connected with gender and ‘race’ felt by those living through the last decade of the nineteenth century. The Gothic elements of Trilby never quite realize themselves as fully uncanny, being continually counterpointed by a rather banal realism: Svengali dies from nothing more sinister than a heart attack and we learn that Trilby was trained to sing beautifully. The novel equivocates; it avoids judgement by evasion. It is indeed a problematic text, its ambiguity capturing a shift in subjectivity at a crucial moment. In particular, most of the novel’s tensions are captured in the figure of Svengali who functions, like many representations of ‘the Jew’ at this time, as ‘a central Modernist shifting signifier, the slipperiness of which threatened the already crumbling boundaries of gender within the era’.41 Again, then, this is a Janus-faced text, looking backward (to Victorian notions of womanhood; to superstition; to a rigid class system; to racial stereotypes) and forward (to the New Woman and the flâneuse; to a secular society; to a more fluid, cosmopolitan and liberal social milieu). It looks forward, in fact, to the world we see portrayed in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. However, whereas Trilby is a comic turn turned serious (or at least, melancholy), Barnes’s novel is a serious turn turned comic. Whereas Trilby appropriates certain Gothic tropes and devices in the spirit of comedy (although it cannot sustain this), Nightwood sets out to parody the Gothic while engaging with Modernist techniques; in so doing, it draws upon Gothic’s powerful resources in order to create a bleakly comic critique of late modernity. The result is a novel which recalls the dark comic lyricism of Céline’s work42 and which anticipates the comic nihilism of writers such as Samuel Beckett, particularly in the aphoristic utterances of ‘Dr’ Matthew O’Connor:

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I tell you . . . if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say “Love” and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog. (N, p. 46) We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. (N, p. 122) Like du Maurier, Djuna Barnes sets her tale in Paris. This, however, is 1920s Paris, itself set in a Europe which has lived through the horrors of the First World War and which is moving towards profound upheaval.43 Published in 1936, Nightwood is, like Joyce’s Ulysses, a quintessentially urban novel. Barnes’s expatriate city forms the setting for a bizarre encounter with boundaries that, once transgressed, then have their very existence called into question. In this context, the figures who, between them, represent both physical and metaphysical wandering (the garrulous doctor and the enigmatic Robin Vote) are of key importance. In enacting the role of the flâneur, a distinctive modern identity, they also evoke parodic Gothic resonances of monstrosity and vampirism (Robin emotionally ‘feeds off’ her victims/lovers and the novel’s engagement with ‘freakery’ is pertinent here). Thus, the Paris of Nightwood is appropriately represented as dark and labyrinthine: a Gothic space in which the boundaries of everyday reality threaten to dissolve.44 Symbolically this is marked by the novel’s emphasis on the grey areas between night and day or, as the French would put it, the time ‘entre chien et loup’ – that moment which divides domesticated daylight from the savagery of the dark. Our attention is drawn to the twilight and the dawn; even the accurate Parisian topography, with its identification of the rue du Cherche-Midi seems fortuitous. The world beyond Paris is also represented through Gothic spaces: the Volkbeins’ Viennese home contains ancestral but fake portraits and a ‘thick dragon’s blood pile of rugs from Madrid’ (N, p. 17); the novel’s final, strange scene, which takes place in the ruined chapel on Nora’s estate in America, recalls the traditional Gothic novel’s fondness of the sacrilegious act – for example, the rape of the drugged Antonia by Ambrosio the monk in the Convent of St Clare that we find in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), or the staking of Lucy Westenra’s body in the churchyard in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. More generally, in focusing on the ‘wood’ of the dark unconscious as the underside of the bright modern polis, Nightwood signals a rejection of the traditional binaries and divisions which mark post-Enlightenment thought and a denial of the Enlightenment’s legacy of rationality: in that respect, it is characteristically Gothic. Through its variously damaged and suffering characters, Nightwood offers, on the

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one hand, a profoundly pessimistic view of the world; in the doctor’s words, ‘There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations’ (N, p. 128). The sense of personal pain and exclusion expressed by these characters is adumbrated by their situation within a wider social hierarchy that denigrates minorities (Jews, the Irish, blacks, ‘inverts’) as ‘freaks’. On the other hand, however, as Jane Marcus has argued, Nightwood’s celebration of such minorities can be read as both ‘Rabelaisian’ and ‘hilarious’.45 Nightwood challenges us to make such connections whilst acknowledging that the reader might have difficulty in understanding them: ‘the tree of night is the hardest to mount, the dourest tree to scale, the most difficult of branch . . .’ (N, p. 123). Nightwood’s plot revolves around the life and relationships of Robin Vote who, as a young American living in Paris, marries into the Austrian Volkbein family and bears her husband a son whom she deserts within the space of a few weeks. The novel follows her quest for emotional, sexual and intellectual liberation enacted through lesbian relationships with Nora Flood and Jenny Petherbridge, both fellow American expatriates in Paris. The unfolding of the novel’s bizarre plot is counterpointed by the anguished but comic monologues of Matthew O’Connor, an Irish American expatriate living in Paris. The tale of Robin Vote and her lovers thus appears to be a tale of transgression; in telling it, however, Nightwood questions the very validity of terms such as ‘transgression’ and ‘normality’. Robin, who has a predilection for reading de Sade (N, p. 73), and who denies the claims of heterosexuality and motherhood, indulges in cross-dressing, promiscuity, lesbianism and bestiality. In so doing, she becomes a personification of abjection, defined by Kristeva as that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’46 Matthew O’Connor, who is a fake doctor and a transvestite is, like Robin Vote, something of a ‘freak’. His ancestry and interests bring together some extraordinary oppositions: ‘An Irish man from the Barbary Coast (Pacific Street, San Franscisco), whose interest in gynaecology had driven him half around the world’ (N, p. 29), he is also a Catholic who masturbates in church and who performs abortions. Indeed, the novel completely destabilizes the boundaries between Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Gentile, masculine and feminine, human and animal, savage and civilized, sane and insane, dream and ‘reality’. Moreover, it offers alternative ‘family’ structures to the conventional nuclear family of the modern period (exposed as destructive

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and abusive both here and in Barnes’s other writings). Several ‘trinities’ replace the holy trinity of father, mother and child: Jenny, Robin and the child Sylvia; Robin, Nora and the doll; Felix, Frau Mann and young Guido; Nora, Robin and the dog. Despite the emotional anguish of these triads, such ‘families’ are seen as no more damaging than the conventional nuclear family. In particular, Nora’s memory of her grandmother as a female comic-grotesque who ‘dressed as a man, wearing a billycock and a corked moustache, ridiculous and plump in tight trousers and a red waistcoat’ (N, p. 95) and who, it is intimated, sexually abused her as a child, evokes such suffering.47 The memory surfaces in a dream where it becomes externalized as being inflicted on Robin, a Robin ‘disfigured and eternalized by the hieroglyphics of sleep and pain’ (N, p. 96). ‘Normality’ as benign is therefore thrown into question, particularly by Robin Vote; in Matthew O’Connor’s words, ‘She was always holding God’s bags of tricks upside down’ (p. 162). Robin’s melodramatic Lady Macbeth-like behaviour (‘Felix . . . found her standing in the centre of the floor holding the child high in her hand as if she were about to dash it down . . .’ [N, p. 74]) suggests that the constraints of ‘normality’ can drive people to desperate acts. Through the use of parody and melodrama, the novel seeks to strip away the patina of cultural idealization from ‘the family’ in order to reveal its power dynamics as inherently exploitative and destructive. There is certainly no capitulation in this novel to bourgeois propriety and ‘family values’. Instead, in a comic turn of the Gothic, the novel’s transgressors are celebrated with wit and ironic scepticism. The mesmerized woman of the nineteenth-century text is here transformed into ‘la somnabule’, whose self-induced trance protects her from absorption back into conventional society. This state that descends on Robin just before she becomes pregnant seems to stay with her and induces a sleepy wandering (hence the title of the second chapter, ‘La Somnambule’):48 she took to going out; wandering the countryside; to train travel, to other cities, alone and engrossed. Once, not having returned for three days, and Felix nearly beside himself with terror, she walked in late at night and said that she had been half-way to Berlin. (N, pp. 70–71) After the birth of young Guido, ‘Robin took to wandering again’, returning in a ‘disinterested’ state; she was, we are told, ‘almost never home’ (N, pp. 74–75). Later, when she moves in with Nora, Robin takes to nocturnal strolling, wandering in the dark city spaces

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of Paris, going from café to café, ‘from table to table, from drink to drink, from person to person’ (N, p. 89). Travelling in the States with Jenny Petherbridge, Robin goes ‘wandering without design’ (N, p. 234). All this movement is intimately tied up with her thoughts: she ‘walked in a formless meditation’; her ‘thoughts were in themselves a form of locomotion’ (N, p. 90) but we are never made privy to them. Indeed, she speaks no more than ten times in the novel. There is, then, no point in our looking ‘to the sleeper for the secret that we shall not find’ (N, p. 129). Instead, we look to the garrulous doctor for a transcription of the night’s meaning and for the significance of Robin’s quest, which takes her from lover to lover and eventually back to the States and the wilderness. Unlike Trilby, whose destiny becomes directed by others, Robin remains in control of her own life. In adopting a specifically Modernist mode of lesbianism,49 Robin Vote challenges conventionally feminine behaviour: ‘Robin would walk in, with the aggressive slide to the foot common to tall people, slurred in its accent by the hipless smoothness of her gait – her hands in her pockets, the trench coat with the belt hanging, scowling and reluctant’ (N, p. 103). Both she and Matthew O’Connor, who cross-dresses at night, participate in a flamboyant self-fashioning that deliberately blurs gender boundaries. Describing the love that both he and Nora feel for ‘the invert’, the doctor comments: We were impaled in our childhood upon them as they rode through our primers, the sweetest lie of all, now come to be in boy or girl, for in the girl it is the prince, and in the boy it is the girl that makes a prince a prince – and not a man. (N, p. 194) Such a self-fashioning anticipates arguments put forward by critics such as Judith Butler that gender is performed by, rather than intrinsic to, the individual. Examining the characters of Nightwood in this way enables us to see how Barnes’s parodic reworking of certain Gothic tropes creates a comic turn in the novel that results in a peculiarly ambivalent reading of modern, urban subjectivity. Rather than a bohemian phase in the construction of the bourgeois self, urban identity is seen as a way of exploiting the fragmenting process of modern life so that the self becomes multifaceted and protean, capable of selftransformation and self-realization. Metamorphosis, in this sense, has become an aspect of urban life and is marked by elements of fakery, performance and parody.

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Matthew O’Connor’s performance of femininity, in particular, is parodic in the extreme: In the narrow iron bed, with its heavy and dirty linen sheets, lay the doctor in a woman’s flannel night gown. The doctor’s head, with its over-large black eyes, its full gun-metal cheeks and chin, was framed in the golden semi-circle of a wig with long pendant curls that touched his shoulders, and falling back against the pillow, turned up the shadowy interior of their cylinders. He was heavily rouged and his lashes painted. (N, p. 117) This is a man who always wanted desperately to be a woman: am I to blame if I’ve turned up this time as I shouldn’t have been, when it was a high soprano I wanted, and deep corn curls to my bum, with a womb as big as the king’s kettle, and a bosom as high as the bowsprit of a fishing schooner? And what do I get but a face on me like an old child’s bottom? . . . in my heart is the wish for children and knitting. God, I never asked better than to boil some good man’s potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months by the calendar. (N, pp. 132–133) There is pathos in the doctor’s confession but also an element of comic grotesquerie in his mimicry of the ‘opposite’ sex. Moreover, his flamboyant imitation of femininity recalls the pageantry and the fakery of the circus described within the novel’s first few pages. Within this underworld community, its members adopt extravagantly false titles (‘Princess Nadja, a Baron von Tink, a Principessa Stasera y Stasero, a King Buffo and a Duchess of Broadback’ [N, p. 25]). They also inflect sexual identities as it suits them: the Duchess of Broadback (actually a transvestite, as is indicated by her ‘real’ name, Frau Mann) performs her trapeze act ‘as unsexed as a doll’ (N, p. 28). Deliberately exploiting the freedom that such freakishness gives them, they continually challenge the boundaries, especially the sexual boundaries, upheld by that side of Paris that is bourgeois.50 Indeed, the baroque tattoos which cover the body of ‘Nikka, the nigger’, a bear-fighter, indicate as much