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: his back is adorned by ‘a terse account in early monkish script – called by some people indecent, by others Gothic – of the really deplorable condition of Paris before hygiene was introduced’ (N, pp. 31, 32–33). Matthew O’Connor’s own freakishness demonstrates the absurdity of existence: he shows a profound and ironic awareness of fragmentation

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of the self within the modern world, ‘“Even the contemplative life is only an effort . . . to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out”’ (pp. 191–192). In essence, the doctor’s cynical, comic and highly poetic monologues on the meaning of life and the night are the thoughts of the flâneur; indeed, he can be seen in the same light that Adorno portrayed Kierkegaard: ‘Thus the flâneur promenades in his room; the world only appears to him reflected by pure inwardness.’51 Whereas Robin represents the flâneur’s characteristic act of strolling, the doctor articulates the flâneur’s perspective of alienation and anomie. In the long chapter ‘Watchman, what of the Night?’ Matthew O’Connor gives us his reading of the ‘Town of Darkness’ (p. 119) and of the night, just as the watchman in the Book of Isaiah (which provides the chapter’s title) tells of the fall of Babylon. The night here is presented as ‘a life’ (p. 121), the life of the dispossessed: those who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches all night long in fear and anguish . . . When one meets them at high noon they give off, as if it were a protective emanation, something dark and muted. (p. 137) Between them, then, Robin Vote and Matthew O’Connor enact the physical and the metaphysical wanderings of the flâneur. Associated particularly with Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, flânerie has become emblematic of Modernism and of a modern subjectivity shaped by the urban experience. Moving between Vienna, Paris, Berlin and New York, Nightwood is set mainly in the French capital, and embraces the Modernist preoccupation with the city as a defining element in the evolution of a modern consciousness. Nightwood’s topography is limited but significant: we are made aware of the café society and come to know the names of characters’ favourite haunts. The ‘doctor’, Matthew O’Connor, lives ‘close to the Church of St. Sulpice’ he is, we are told, ‘a feature’ of the Place de St. Sulpice and his favourite haunt is the Café de la Mairie du Sixième (p. 48). Robin Vote is associated with Montparnasse: she stays at the Hôtel Récamier on arrival in the city;52 she moves into Nora’s flat on the rue du ChercheMidi (which leads from the Luxembourg Quarter to Montparnasse) and her degenerate night wanderings in cafés and bars take place in this area. Significantly, both the Luxembourg Quarter and Montparnasse are part of what has been defined by authors such as Shari Benstock as ‘expatriate Paris’;53 Montparnasse, in particular, became the home of

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many avant-garde artists, poets and writers from the turn of the century. Robin and the doctor are, then, inhabitants of bohemian Paris and – as Americans – they are expatriate flâneurs in a foreign city. The association of Paris with the figure of the flâneur derives mainly from Baudelaire’s celebration of him as an artist nauseated by bourgeois domestic life who seeks meaning in the public space of the city.54 For Baudelaire, the flâneur is the hero of modernity, a man who, in the words of Benjamin, ‘goes botanizing on the asphalt’.55 Haunted by a sense of dissatisfaction and of incompleteness which compels him to look for fulfilment outside himself, he gazes upon and interacts with the city space. The resulting urban epistemology comes to represent a valuable form of knowledge in an increasingly secular world: ‘La connaissance du coeur humain, c’est l’érudition des flâneurs’ in the words of François de Curel.56 Such knowledge, however, is that of the artist, a detached and isolated figure whose alienation from modern consumer life is one of the conditions of his being and whose state of anomie precludes creativity but induces meditation and dreaming (interestingly, Benjamin draws a close link between flânerie, imagination and dreaming57). This state of consciousness, whilst clearly relating to fin-de-siècle representations of the artistic life in bohemian Paris, including du Maurier’s, suggests a more detached state which anticipates a specifically modern mode of being – freer but more isolated. According to Keith Tester: the activity of the flâneur is essentially about freedom, the meaning of existence (or the lack of a meaning of existence) and beingwith-others in the modern urban spaces of the city.58 As the two ‘faces’ of the flâneur, Robin and the doctor exemplify the Cartesian dualism and split subjectivity of modernity. However, the novel’s strange culminating scene relocates the modernist sense of alienation that they exemplify away from its characteristic urban setting and into a traditional Gothic milieu. Robin’s strange union with a dog in a decaying chapel on Nora’s American estate provides a curious closure to such an urban novel. In acting out what O’Connor calls ‘the brawl of the beast’ (N, p. 123), Robin visibly transgresses the boundary between animal and human in the novel’s final moment of bleak climax and reconciliation: He ran this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces,

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moving head to head, until she gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees. (p. 239) The setting of the chapel frames the act as one in which boundaries with which Gothic texts are preoccupied – spiritual/physical, sacred/ profane and obscene/sublime – are also breached. Thus it would seem that the novel’s climax articulates the insight that Modernism’s anxieties concerning the fragmentation of the self are essentially Gothic. Gothic’s uncanny darknesses are not eliminated by the modern city but are the very foundations of the urban subjectivity it produces. Robin’s activities as flâneuse lead inexorably to an encounter with the beast within and an accommodation with it.59 Many aspects of the novel, including its apparent embrace of bestiality, continue to disturb readers. However, Nightwood also makes us laugh. Laughter, though, like abjection, is culturally and historically inflected; today’s readers, while finding much of Nightwood funny, might not see much to laugh at in Trilby. The laughter Nightwood evokes promises the accommodation of alternative ways of being rather than the terror of disorientation, whereas Trilby finally avoids such accommodation. If, as Nancy J. Levine and Marian Urquilla claim, ‘Barnes’s work can itself help to redefine our notions of modernism’,60 it is partly because the extraordinary conflation of the Gothic, the comic and the Modernist we find in Nightwood renders it a tour de force in the demolition of cultural, philosophic and generic boundaries. In its portrayal of the city space as a place of encounter, Trilby also resonates with Baudelaire’s modern and specifically urban aesthetic which presents the flâneur as a figure to be reconsidered in terms of dualism and ambiguity. In Michele Hannoosh’s words: The modern city is the space of the comic, a kind of caricature, presenting the flâneur, like the laugher, with an image of his own dualism, self-ignorance, and otherness, his status as subject and object, implicated in the same urban experience he seems to control. The theory of the comic invests the idea of modernity with reciprocity, the subject’s status as laugher and object of laughter, self and other, thus preventing the subjective construction and appropriation of the world so often linked with the project of modernism.61 Trilby, then, perhaps anticipates the project of Modernism while Nightwood inflects it. Trilby uses comic devices to distance, contain and

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deflect the disturbing questions it raises, thus reflecting a late nineteenthcentury ambivalence towards the shifting roles played by nationality, gender and ‘race’ in determining a ‘modern’ identity. Barnes’s novel, however, seeks to deconstruct the very premises upon which Gothic fear is founded, encouraging through its comic strategies an intellectual scepticism. Both make use of the grotesque and parody in effecting their comic Gothic turns. Both have at their heart a recognition of conventional morality as negative and destructive in its imprisonment of creative potential and the imagination.

4 Topography and the Comic Gothic Turn

In this chapter we shall look at how the relationship between place and identity is explored in comic Gothic writing. As we saw in Chapter 3, both Trilby and Nightwood focus on Paris as an arena in which the potentially hybrid identities of late modernity can be ambiguously played out. Both glimpse the rural as a peripheral alternative to the metropolis. In Trilby, true to an English cultural and literary heritage in which the country house and the countryside are indicative of tradition, Little Billee’s family home in Devonshire is associated with the conservative values of rural England. In Nightwood, the rural is represented by Nora’s rambling estate in North America that has been in her family for two hundred years and which, ‘a mass of tangled grass and weeds’, contains ‘its own burial ground, and a decaying chapel’ (p. 77). It is here that Robin’s peculiar communion with a dog takes place, man’s best friend, as it were, becoming woman’s. The first two novels we explore in this chapter continue this tradition of setting the countryside against the city in a binary opposition. Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934), moving between London, a large country house and the wilds of the Brazilian jungle, is a bitter and satiric vision of life in the twentieth century, whereas Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932) is a more benign novel that uses burlesque and parody to critique fictional representations of the rural. Our third text, Barbara Comyns’s comically sinister The Vet’s Daughter (1959), set on the borders of Clapham and Battersea in London, derives much of its power from the incongruity arising from the novel’s disturbing scenes of domestic violence and the matter-of-fact way in which they are narrated. The final novel we examine, Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), converts the devil into a charismatic rogue with horns (or the remnants of them) who challenges the conventional values of Peckham’s inhabitants. These last two 95

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novels are set in rather shabby areas of London that have neither the sophistication of the metropolitan centre nor the leafy respectability of the far-flung suburbs. All four novels present subjectivity and identity as strongly related to place and class. However, they offer quite different comic Gothic turns within the spectrum of comic Gothic writing, as we shall see. Both A Handful of Dust and Cold Comfort Farm were published in the early 1930s. During this period, high culture was characterized by not only the last phase of Modernism as a movement and the burgeoning of a literature of commitment, but also by the emergence of overtly comic Gothic texts that present an England in decline. That such a mode of fiction should appear during this decade is not surprising, given the instability of the 1930s: the shift in class and gender relations after the Great War; the breaking down of England’s identity as an agricultural and imperial nation; the demise of the country house; the economic problems of the Great Depression and the consequent political turn to fascism on the one side and to communism on the other. These works display their authors’ awareness that space and place are textual constructs – that narratives of the city and of the countryside themselves need deconstructing and that this is done most effectively through the comic. As comic Gothic novels, both A Handful of Dust and Cold Comfort Farm set up a witty dialogue between the traditions of rural England and the city. Despite their seductiveness, these traditions are finally seen as no defence against modernity and they thus become the focus of parodic Gothic attack. Both novels clearly mark the sense of an England in transition between a rural economy and an urban one; between a class-based society and a meritocracy; between Victorian constructions of gender and a world in which all women now have the vote and are demanding further civil and legal rights.1 Waugh’s use of the Gothic for parodic purposes in A Handful of Dust is overt. By 1934, he had already gained a reputation as a writer of surreal satirical comic novels, despite his own denial that he wrote satire.2 All Waugh’s previous novels had taken as their subject the moral bankruptcy of contemporary urban society. Vile Bodies (1930) had presented an unrelenting portrait of futility in the party-going society of 1920s London: its narrative exposes the underlying barbarity of the amorality of the nation’s capital and culminates in a scene set on ‘the biggest battlefield in the history of the world’.3 His 1932 novel, Black Mischief, however, unlike Huxley’s Brave New World, offers no redemptive vision of the noble savage but turns the same sharp satiric eye on an equally corrupt and barbarous African society. Tony Last, Waugh’s

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‘hero’ in A Handful of Dust, is – like Decline and Fall’s Paul Pennyfeather and Vile Bodies’ Adam Symes – a passive figure who takes much for granted and who is motivated by a vague desire to do the right thing. He is a man who, in the words of a contemporary reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement, ‘is so incapable of helping himself that he is not worth helping’.4 Like them, he is defenceless against the depredations of the ruthlessly selfish characters who people Waugh’s metropolis. For this author, London is the scene of modern life and a place in which human relationships have become debased and meaningless. His London is an ‘unreal city’ with a ‘dead’ population.5 In his representation of the city in this way, Waugh is conforming to the prevailing intellectual orthodoxy of his time, an intellectual orthodoxy that, according to John Carey, was created largely through T.S. Eliot’s influence.6 The adultery of Tony’s wife, Brenda, is represented as a further development of her regular visits to London for such banal pursuits as shopping and probably unnecessary visits to the ‘bone-setter’ Mr Cruttwell.7 There are echoes, too, of Eliot’s Madame Sosostris in Brenda’s visit to the home of her friend Polly Cockpurse to consult Mrs Northcote, a fortune-teller, ‘who read fortunes in a different way, by reading the soles of the feet’.8 The affair with the penniless and worthless socialite, John Beaver, is no grand passion but rather a project taken on by a bored wife with no apparent moral compass. Tony’s all-too-ready compliance with her demand for a divorce in which he will be cited as the guilty party is without conscience turned by Brenda, her family and, not least, the unlikeable Beaver into an assumption of his guilt and a licence to ruin him financially. The ruthless behaviour of those who find their natural home in London is the marker of a specifically modern barbarity. Waugh’s representation of human nature in this way accords, however, not only with Eliot’s portrayal of London citizens in The Waste Land but also resonates with David Punter’s definition of the Gothic: Gothic is . . . intimately to do with the notion of the barbaric . . . (since) those writers who are referred to as Gothic turn out to be those who bring us up against the boundaries of the civilized, who demonstrate to us the relative nature of ethical and behavioural codes, and who place, over against the conventional world, a different sphere in which these codes operate at best in distorted forms.9 In contrast with the rootless anti-heroes of the earlier novels, Tony is the owner of a large country estate and sees himself as the custodian of a valuable heritage. Initially, it might seem that Tony’s rootedness in

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the countryside and his identity as an English squire is the counterbalance to the spiritual ‘waste land’ of London. However, this very identity is the means through which the novel introduces its element of Gothic parody, an identity that led Waugh to describe him as ‘a Gothic man in the hands of savages’.10 Hetton Abbey, Tony’s country seat, to which he dedicates both his emotional and financial resources, has been since the middle of the previous century an elaborate fake, as the ‘quotation’ from the county Guide Book at the opening of Chapter 2 indicates: ‘This, formerly one of the notable houses of the county, was entirely rebuilt in the Gothic style and is now devoid of interest’ (HD, p. 14). The outward and visible sign of the heritage that Tony is so committed to maintaining is, to use one of the key words of Vile Bodies, ‘bogus’. Hetton with its elaborate Gothic features, its ‘lancet windows of armorial stained glass’, its ‘dining hall with its hammer-beam roof and pitch-pine minstrel gallery’, its bedrooms named after Arthurian characters is, like Walpole’s ‘Gothic Villa’, an artefact dedicated to the assertion of a remote and unreliable history. For Tony, ‘all these things with which he had grown up were a source of constant delight and exultation . . . things of tender memory and proud possession’ (HD, p. 15). Walpole’s Gothic imagination, however, provided a means of giving shape to fear and the literature of which he is considered a founding father constituted a powerful means of engagement with the anxieties generated by the formation of new subjectivities in a modern world. In contrast, the Victorian use of Gothic forms, adopted in order to create myths of origin, represented a sentimental attempt to recreate a world from which the rapidly modernizing nineteenth century felt exiled. This Victorian fascination with a sanitized Middle Ages, particularly its version of the Arthurian legend, has been enshrined in Hetton and edifices like it. The corollary of this is Tony’s ritual observance of religion: church-going is portrayed as part of his social duty and no source of strength in times of trouble (‘the last thing one wants to talk about at a time like this is religion’, he remarks after the death of his son [HD, p. 115]). The domestication and trivialization of Gothic represented by Hetton, therefore, is a symptom of his exile from the possibilities of spiritual fulfilment, an exile that is made physical at the end of the novel. This ‘Gothic man’ is therefore also a ‘modern’ man, particularly in his embrace of a counterfeit medievalism. Tony’s perception of himself as guardian of this history is at odds with the events of his life in which his Guinevere deserts him not for a Lancelot but for Beaver and the heir to his line is killed by a random accident. Brenda is often shown in ‘Guinevere’, her room at Hetton,

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being visited by her husband while resting in her bed on a dais or attending to her hair and make-up. His visits are not particularly welcome and he is kept cordially at arm’s length; the echoes of the lady in her chamber in Eliot’s The Waste Land are subtle but unmistakable. Tony’s affectionate espousal of Gothic has been selective: his is an ‘English Gothic’, purged of its power to represent darkness and barbarity and leaving Tony prey to a savagery which he cannot identify. On realizing that Brenda and her lawyers intend to take everything: His mind had become suddenly clearer on many points that had puzzled him. A whole Gothic world had come to grief . . . there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled . . . (HD, p. 151) This bleak vision of loss is what tempts Tony into joining the explorer Dr Messinger in his search for a fabled South American city. Here the city as utopia beckons and its achievement will entail sacrifice and quest. The city can only be reached by crossing the perilous wilderness of the Brazilian jungle. In Tony’s mind, this city is a place whose discovery will, in his naïve imagination, restore the joy of Hetton to his besieged soul. He embarks upon his quest still ensnared by the delusion that is Hetton. He conceives of the fabled city as a ‘transfigured Hetton’, a city: Gothic in character, all vanes and pinnacles, gargoyles, battlements, groining and tracery, pavilions and terraces . . . pennons and banners floating on the sweet breeze, everything luminous and translucent. (HD, p. 160) If, in his fevered delirium, alone in the Brazilian jungle, Tony’s vision almost transmutes into a spiritual apprehension of the metaphysical Augustinian civitas dei with ‘gilded cupolas and spires of alabaster’, it is rudely and bathetically interrupted by the imagined sound of the voice of Ambrose (Hetton’s butler) announcing, ‘The City is served’ (HD, p. 203). From this point in the novel it becomes apparent that Tony is to be denied any heroically tragic outcome in the conventional sense. It remains for him to be shown fear in a handful of dust, through a bizarre incarceration in the middle of the Brazilian jungle where he is condemned to read and reread in perpetuity the novels of Dickens to the illiterate Mr Todd (whose name, as several commentators have pointed out,

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means ‘death’ in German). Thus is his life measured out not in coffee spoons but through the dusty and ant-ridden pages of an optimistic humanist narrative about redemptive possibilities in that seat of barbarism, London: the works of Charles Dickens. (It should be noted that Waugh apparently loathed Dickens, considering his novels to be smug and complacent and dubbing him ‘unhappy hypocrite’.11) The closure of the novel, therefore, offers no consoling end but gives us a Modernist vision of eternal exile and a Gothic stasis of perpetual torture. This is parodic, satiric Gothic: after the desertion of the Brazilian ‘savages’ (frightened by a clockwork mouse), the undramatic death of Dr Messinger (drowned in ten feet of falls), and Tony’s fevered solitary journey haunted by visions of Brenda and other English ‘savages’, there is no body horror (indeed, Mr Todd rescues the delirious Tony with his body swollen, cut and covered with insect bites and restores him to physical health). There is no more haunting by visible ghosts, only the monotonous reiteration of the Word of a bogus literary father. Hetton meanwhile falls into the hands of the thrifty, bourgeois and irredeemably ordinary ‘impoverished Lasts’ who hope to restore its fortunes by means of a silver fox farm (the third set of savages to which Tony succumbs, according to Waugh)12, while the human savage, Mrs Beaver, in truly modern entrepreneurial spirit, has taken the opportunity to arrange the erection of a memorial to ‘Anthony Last of Hetton, Explorer’. Last things, indeed. Despite its comic air, Waugh’s novel offers a bleaker vision than Eliot’s poem: there is no ‘Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata’, no ‘Shantih shantih shantih’, only a living death for Tony Last and for Hetton a destiny perhaps already mapped out with the destruction of the old pre-Reformation house and the erection of the bogus Gothic edifice that in the end betrays him. In Waugh’s work, it is not until Brideshead Revisited (1945) that such an act of vandalism is redeemed through spirituality. Despite its comic Gothic turns, Waugh’s vision is profoundly bleak and this is reflected in his portrayal of place. London, instead of offering bright minds and the excitement of enacting alternative identities, houses sharks, shams, adulterers and corrupt politicians: it is a place of malignant, rather than productive, fakery. We are thus offered a caricature of the city as urban decadence while the countryside, emptied of its meaningful traditions, is portrayed as falling into the hands of a soulless bunch of entrepreneurs. Unlike that of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915), the wilderness of the Brazilian jungle in Waugh’s novel does not offer a changed perspective on life in England; rather it represents the dark night of the soul, but without any metaphysical resolution of the soul’s torment. In

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this sense, Waugh’s novel is a blackly comic fugue on the theme of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). As one might expect, this pessimistic rendering of place is complemented by conservative attitudes to gender: men adhere, albeit without much competence, to the traditional roles of landowner, groom, member of parliament, explorer and farmer (although the last role is given a twist in Hetton becoming a silver fox farm). Women who work, like Mrs Beaver, are rapacious; rich widows, such as Mrs Rattery, play bridge ‘for six or seven hours a day’ to kill time and take morphine to kill boredom (HD, p. 97). Only Thérèse de Vitré, who is eighteen years old, Catholic and from Trinidad, seems to have any moral integrity. Her brief appearance towards the end of the novel, together with the intimations her surname carries,13 suggests a glimpse of redemption via religious faith. For Waugh, England is the land of a new barbarism; his hope lies in an older religious commitment not dreamt of by the hapless Tony Last who, it transpires, believes himself to be a Gothic man but is irredeemably a modern man. There is, then, little ambivalence or ambiguity in A Handful of Dust; instead, parody of the Gothic is used to satiric effect in order to interrogate the notion of progress in England between the wars and, indeed, of modernity itself. Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, published two years earlier in 1932, also parodies Gothic conventions in order to offer a different view of modernity. A highly intertextual novel, it features a young woman intent on resurrecting Austenian values in a world characterized by romantic representations of the countryside and clichéd Gothic. The element of burlesque in this text is thus aimed at previous literary constructions of gender. A less satiric work than A Handful of Dust, Gibbons’s novel is optimistic in that it presents the modern world as offering change and opportunity, particularly for women and the working-class male. Orphaned at the age of 19, the practical Flora Poste finds herself unable to earn her keep in her home city of London. Having inherited ‘one hundred pounds a year, and no property’, she decides to live cheaply by inviting herself to stay at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex with her relatives, the Starkadders.14 Gibbons represents the countryside as a textual space already constructed by, among others, Emily Brontë, D.H. Lawrence, the Georgian poets and novelists such as John Cowper Powys, Sheila Kaye-Smith and Mary Webb (who had enjoyed enormous popularity in the twenties, particularly with her novel Precious Bane [1924]).15 Flora’s actions in re-ordering the lives of the inhabitants of Cold Comfort Farm are like those of an Emma who, far from having to acknowledge her limitations, is able to impose her own vision of how things should be upon those around her. In doing

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so, she turns Cold Comfort Farm from a Gothic edifice reminiscent of Wuthering Heights into a ‘desirable residence’ and propels various members of the Starkadder family into new roles in the modern world. Much of the novel’s comic incongruity thus derives from a Peacockian contrast of opposites evolving out of Flora’s stay with her relatives, who exhibit all the characteristics of obsession and dark dealing that you would expect from a Gothic tale. There is a ‘madwoman in the attic’, old Mrs Starkadder, known as Aunt Ada Doom, who holds the whole family in her tyrannical emotional grip. Aunt Ada, as she repeatedly states, ‘saw something nasty in the woodshed’ (subsequently rendered as the cowshed or the bicycle shed) when she was two and has, she claims, been affected ever since. There are various menfolk who exhibit differing kinds of obsessional behaviour, including the patriarchal figure, Amos, who is reminiscent of Wuthering Heights’ Joseph in his harsh Christian fundamentalism. His wife, Cousin Judith, who has invited Flora into their midst, reminds us of the Gothic plot’s preoccupation with issues of inheritance by mysteriously referring to Flora as Robert Poste’s child and alluding to some wrong done to him by the Starkadders. Judith has ‘an unnecessarily red and voluminous shawl on her shoulders, and a tumbling mass of hair’ (CCF, p. 49). It is she who harbours the incestuous urges, usually directed at the heroine, so frequently found in the Gothic plot. Judith’s obsession – like that of Lawrence’s Gertrude Morel16 – is, however, with her son, Seth, who is represented as a parody of the Gothic hero. Seth, irresistible to women, is first shown by the kitchen range: a tall young man whose riding-boots were splashed with mud to the thigh, and whose coarse linen shirt was open to the waist. The firelight lit up his diaphragm muscles as they heaved slowly in rough rhythm with the porridge. (CCF, p. 38) Gibbons, through Flora, hijacks the Gothic plot and tames its characters into social respectability or glamorous modernity, Seth’s destiny, for example, becoming the ‘silver screen’. Judith is diagnosed as a suitable case for treatment and Flora arranges for her to be taken away for psychoanalysis in luxurious surroundings. A long conversation between Flora and Aunt Ada Doom in her attic produces the emergence of the old lady clad in black leather and ready to fly off to Paris. Marriage, however, is the Austenesque destiny of several characters. Cousin Urk, cheated of the beautiful Elfine, opts for Meriam, the hired girl (already the mother of four illegitimate children by Seth, whom her mother is

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hoping to train up to be a jazz band). Flora transforms the poetry-writing child of nature, Elfine, into a smart modern young woman with a chic haircut and propels her into the marital embrace of the young local squire. The novel ends with their wedding celebrations and Flora’s own departure – in a private aeroplane called ‘Speed Cop the Second’ – with her London cousin Charles, whom she has summoned to take her away and with whom she plans to spend the next fifty years in wedded bliss. As in Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and A Room of One’s Own (1929), modern modes of transport, such as the car and the aeroplane, suggest dynamism, progress and change. However, as in Austen’s novels, the lucky or wise women are rewarded with marriage as closure. Is this, then, a reactionary work, in which Flora’s wedding to a suitable man as the best thing that can happen to a young woman signals a retreat, in the face of immense social changes ushered in by the Great War, to conservative values? We would argue that it is not, for the double-coding of Cold Comfort Farm results in a novel that, like many parodic works, is ‘fundamentally double and divided’. This ambivalence that we see in parody stems, according to Linda Hutcheon, ‘from the dual drives of conservative and revolutionary forces that are inherent in its nature as authorized transgression’.17 What one critic describes as the novel’s ‘exaggerated consciousness of its own fictionality’18 signals not just an engagement with previous late-Romantic and Gothic representations of desire and romantic love. It also positions it within contemporary debates concerning the nature of marriage and alerts us to social constructions of femininity in the 1930s as contemporary fictions that need to be read with cynical detachment. The novel should, then, be read with an awareness of what The Listener in 1931 described as a ‘Present Crisis in Marriage’, which provoked a debate evident throughout the 1930s.19 Flora’s room in Cold Comfort Farm contains books entitled Did She Love Him? and And How She Loved Him. Her own favourite books, apart from Austen’s Mansfield Park (which provides the epigraph for Gibbons’s novel), however, are Pensées and The Higher Common Sense by Abbé Fausse-Maigre (whose name, which translates as ‘falsely thin’, suggests a bogus ascetism). These go everywhere with her and clearly provide a strong antidote to the twentieth-century equivalent of the conduct book that extols selfrenunciation for women. Flora is thus a more benign version of Waugh’s Brenda Last: like many women of the 1930s, she wishes to resist the Victorian model of sentimental love and marriage, a nostalgic fantasy itself often embellished by romantic idylls of the countryside.

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Furthermore, against a background of Lawrentian writing that elevated the phallus to mystical heights, these women were demanding increased emancipation, not least in the form of more accessible birth control.20 The fate of Meriam Beetle, the unmarried hired girl at Cold Comfort Farm, who becomes pregnant for the fourth time, should perhaps be seen in this context. Against Cousin Judith’s Hardyesque fatalistic acceptance of this fact – ‘’Tes the hand of Nature, and we women cannot escape it’ (CCF, p. 64) – Flora sets her chin and her practical intelligence, advising Meriam on how to prevent conception. Her own marriage is not one based on passion; rather it should be seen as something of an economic contract as well as an emotional one, in the spirit of many matches made in Austen’s novels. This is not to say that Flora decides to abandon her identity as a spirited young woman. She is well aware that female individuality can be compromised by marriage (an issue aired by many in the 1930s including Vera Brittain and Dorothy L. Sayers) and we observe her, throughout the novel, collecting material for her own career as a writer. The novel thus sees her transition from orphan with no property and little money (a situation common to many young Gothic heroines) to a married woman who is secure in the knowledge that her life will be materially comfortable. Having diverted the Starkadders from the fate promised by the Gothic plot, she has re-arranged their destinies in line with a narrative of female autonomy that refuses the seductions of rural romance, agricultural passions and a spurious Lawrentian ‘authenticity’. Thus passion and intensity are either presented quasi-parodically (‘He snatched her roughly into his arms, and looked longingly down into her face’) or understated: their commitment to each other ‘for ever’ is counter-pointed by comments about hair cream and Charles’s casual affirmation of his happiness: ‘He also added inconsequently that he was glad he had been born’ (CCF, pp. 232–233). The return is to London and the last sentence unequivocal: ‘Tomorrow would be a beautiful day’ (CCF, p. 233). The reader can therefore read with confidence ‘beyond the ending’, to use Rachel Blau duPlessis’s words, to imagine a life of self-fulfilment for Flora Poste. During the decade in which A Handful of Dust and Cold Comfort Farm were published, the landscape of England was slowly changing; London, in particular, was becoming suburbanized. As Jessica Maynard notes: in the early 1930s, the motor car, the aerodrome, the suburban sprawl, and a steady stream of weekend trippers were fast encroaching on rural Surrey: instead of the corncrake, the characteristic sound of

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the countryside was the klaxon. ‘Nor does the lane wander any more’, Tomlinson complained. ‘It has been disciplined, and we know how good is discipline. It is broad; it is direct.’ These were no mere topographical observations; they also pointed to a sense of increasing standardization in society.21 The government’s housing policy of the 1940s and 1950s ensured the further growth of suburbia by encouraging the development of private housing and the building of council estates on the fringes of towns. Whilst the latter often became overspill areas for slum clearance projects, the former quickly became synonymous with middle-class respectability and an aspirant working class. There were also suburbs in which the two types of housing were mixed. The same period saw the rise of the nuclear family of two adults and two children and the gradual disappearance of the extended kinship network. This was accompanied by a return, in the years following the Second World War, to more conservative constructions of gender. The desire for stability and a benign social environment, after a period of immense upheaval and suffering, manifested itself not only in the creation of the Welfare State and new housing policies, but also in a revival of separate spheres for men and women. Married women in England were discouraged from working full-time, both by official policies (the Marriage Bar of the Civil Service, for example) and by the cultural climate in general. By the 1950s, the media was representing the home as a place of efficient machinery and emotional authenticity; correspondingly, the figure of the mother was constructed as a consumer but also glamorized and sentimentalized. The career woman was frequently portrayed as selfish or necessarily unfulfilled; in the media much emphasis was given to the idea that a woman’s proper place was in the home – and that a woman who wished for a life other than that of housewife and mother was somehow perverse. Deirdre Beddoe’s comment that in the 1930s, ‘career women, spinsters and lesbians were all portrayed as highly undesirable stereotypes, to be rejected at all costs’ is just as applicable to the 1950s.22 These two decades were fallow times for feminism and offered women little in terms of social, political and economic advancement. In addition, English society in the 1940s and 1950s was moving into an era of mass consumerism and nationalization. For some, this was progress, in that it promised a brave new world in which ordinary people would be able to work and live in decent conditions; for others, it smacked of too much state intervention and standardization.

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Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye is set in the 1950s and draws on these social phenomena in order to expose the cost for individuals of conformity to the cultural values of the period. The action of Comyns’s novel, however, takes place at the turn of the last century – perhaps to make the point that many women’s lives in the 1950s remained unchanged since the late Victorian period, so far as the emotional dynamic of the family was concerned, despite the large social and cultural changes going on in the wider world. They are both set in less fashionable areas of London, the heroine of The Vet’s Daughter, Alice Rowlands, living in a house on the borders of Battersea and Clapham. Although Clapham, having become popular with professionals and intellectuals in the eighteenth century, was quite a respectable middle-class area in the early 1900s, Battersea, with its history of artisan workers and labourers, was a much poorer and more disreputable part of London at this time. This topographical instability complements the unstable boundary between the outward appearance of the Rowlands as a respectable, professional family and their private world of dysfunctional behaviour, which includes bullying, emotional abuse and casual euthanasia. Spark’s The Ballad takes us to another part of London: by the 1950s Peckham had become impoverished and socially neglected, compared with the urban centre and the fast-growing outer suburbs.23 A district of London yet not part of the city centre, in some ways it still fell within the category of ‘suburban’ as defined in the mid-seventeenth century – a place of ‘inferior, debased, and especially licentious habits of life’,24 rather than evoking the late nineteenth-century vision of the suburb. For the fin de siècle suburb was, ideally, a place of leafy tranquillity and respectability where elegant, spacious houses were built for Victorian and Edwardian commuters who took the train into town each day. Even this positive vision, though, was occasionally inflected by the nineteenth-century metropolitan view of suburbanites as having ‘inferior manners’ and a ‘narrowness of view’25 – still evident, of course, in the stereotype of the suburban dweller as a curtain-twitching, small-minded, Pooterish person.26 By the mid-twentieth century, then, the word ‘suburban’ had become a sliding signifier suggesting an unstable boundary area. As we suggested in our Introduction, the Gothic concerns itself with boundaries and their instabilities. For this reason, the waste lands of Battersea and Peckham offered fruitful settings for the idiosyncratic visions of ‘ordinary’ lives offered by Comyns and Spark. Neither The Vet’s Daughter nor The Ballad of Peckham Rye simply relocates the fantastic horrors of Dracula or Jekyll and Hyde; rather, they continue

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the tradition of comic Gothic by embracing incongruity and dissonance in the spirit of enquiry. Comyns published eleven highly accomplished novels27 during her lifetime (she died in 1992) yet she is now all but forgotten, save for a few succinct entries in companions to literature – one of which describes her style as ‘characteristically faux-naif’ and her work as marked by ‘a piercingly original view of family life and peculiar, often surreal, humour’.28 The influence of Stevie Smith is clear in the way Comyns tells her tales, but the emphasis on the narrator’s suffering and victimization – or potential for it – lends her writing a disturbing and distinctive sense of pathos that tempers the energy and comic ebullience of her work. Her novels, like those of Ivy Compton-Burnett, clearly set out to challenge that twentieth-century sentimental narrative, inherited from the Victorians, which celebrated the domestic and the familial. Combining a Chagallian surrealism with characters who exhibit a Dickensian energy and grotesquerie,29 she adapts Gothic tropes in order to explore the cruelties perpetrated within the middle-class family, which, far from being a sanctuary of emotional warmth and protection, is frequently revealed to be a site of exploitative manipulation. Indeed, much of the novel’s comic incongruity arises from the dislocation we experience between the horrors described by Alice and the unemotional manner, completely lacking in self-pity, in which they are narrated. The focus in Comyns’s novels is invariably the trauma of coping with abuse and exploitation as experienced by a young, sensitive woman. The Vet’s Daughter is thus typical of her work in that the narrator, Alice, is an adolescent girl whose entanglement in abusive and controlling relationships forms the dynamic of the novel’s plot. Published in 1959, Comyns’s novel is all the more remarkable for appearing during a decade when, as we have noted, post-war conservatism was still promoting the family as the route to personal happiness and urging women to place home and husband at the centre of their lives. Set in the early part of the century, The Vet’s Daughter is the story of the adolescent daughter of a bullying veterinary surgeon and his ailing wife. Family relationships are dominated by patriarchal values, so that both mother and daughter have their freedoms direly restricted. Alice has developed various coping devices in order to survive in their dark house; her only moments of joy are those snatched when her father is out and her mother can reminisce about her happy childhood in Wales. It is a grim household in which the vet, far from being a bringer of mercy, treats his animal charges with callousness: those that have been brought to him to be humanely destroyed he sends, instead, to the vivisectionist. This dark world is,

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however, frequently rendered comic in its very bizarreness. As first person narrator, Alice presents her observations so that we see a Gothic world in which bodies are grotesquely dislocated often to comic effect. For example: ‘The door was propped open by a horse’s hoof without a horse joined to it, and I looked through. He was sewing in a peke’s eye.’30 The vet’s patients have suffered in ways that lend the book an air of macabre comedy – the cat that was partly roasted in an oven and the parrot, which exhibits neurotic symptoms, having been confined to the lavatory because of its antisocial shrieking. Yet the novel presents us with a world in which people are frequently treated worse than animals and whose lives deny them any sort of dignity or autonomy. The fate of Alice’s mother, who is suffering from what seems to be cancer, and who is casually ‘put down’ by her husband one evening, takes the novel into the realms of a quiet but chilling Gothic horror as well as humour of the darkest variety. Her father’s subsequent installation of his mistress, Rosa Fisher – or ‘the strumpet from the Trumpet’ (VD, p. 46) as both the ‘daily help’ and the narrator call her – compounds the difficulties of living at home for Alice, especially when Rosa manipulates her into a meeting with a local hotel porter who tries to rape her. A brief romantic interlude with Nicholas, a handsome sailor, leads only to disappointment. Befriended by her father’s locum, a young man named Henry Peebles, Alice leaves London for Hayling Island in order to become a companion to Henry’s depressed and agoraphobic mother, who later commits suicide. The comically surreal dimension of the novel is developed through the narrator’s discovery that she is able to levitate, although the reader will notice that such levitations occur after particularly traumatic episodes (the first after the attempted rape, for example). This takes us, on one level, into the world of the magical and supernatural since we are asked to believe unquestioningly in Alice’s astonishing powers, as she does herself. However, Alice’s ability to levitate can also be read metaphorically: we can relate it, for example, to the now wellrecognized phenomenon of psychological dissociation, developed as a survival tactic or coping mechanism, commonly found in abuse victims. ‘Nothing could be worse than home’ (VD, p. 90) thinks the narrator at one point; her gift of inducing levitation allows her to rise, quite literally, above her tormentors and her suffering. Or, more lyrically, we can read Alice’s ability to levitate as representing the power of the imagination to transcend the horrors of mental cruelty through an act that is sublimely defiant of everyday reality. In this sense, like many magical realist episodes in other texts, it becomes a way of critiquing the oppressive nature of a particular ideology or social structure.31

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However, it is this very gift that compounds Alice’s difficulties for, once he discovers his daughter has this amazing talent, her father sets out to exploit it financially. The novel’s extraordinary dénouement takes place on Clapham Common, Alice having been forced to exhibit her gift to hundreds of paying spectators. She is given a special meal (‘They gave me sherry beaten up with eggs and milk’) and is decked out, like a bride, in a long white dress and white silk stockings with white flowers in her hair (VD, p. 183). She is taken to Clapham in a closed carriage that at one point is described as ‘hearse-like’ (VD, p. 184) although onlookers assume that the group is indeed a wedding-party. However, knowing as we do that this event is a money-making performance engineered by her father, the ‘ceremony’ becomes a grotesque parody of the wedding service, with Alice lying on the damp grass ‘in despair and humiliation’ (VD, p. 186) before she levitates in ‘a frantic effort simply to escape the horror’ (VD, p. 187) of her father’s anger. As David Punter has pointed out, the Gothic ceremonial ‘is not what it purports to be, it is a coagulation around a secret’, functioning around that which has been encrypted.32 The consummation of this bizarre ‘wedding’ is not sex but death and, indeed, Alice’s fate can be read as a form of suicide, echoing that of Mrs Peebles, whose suffering – like that of Alice – has remained encrypted in the narrative of middle-class respectability. More obviously, it also gives expression to marriage as a death-like experience for Alice’s mother – who would rather have married ‘Evans the Post’ than the veterinary surgeon Euan Rowlands, of whom she was always afraid. The novel ends with Alice’s sudden descent, which precipitates her death from injuries and suffocation when the crowd closes in on the main protagonists of the event. Thus the moments of vision in the text finally culminate in a mysterious transcendental episode that fuses the bridal carriage with the hearse to become the Blakean ‘marriage hearse’. The novel thus suggests that marriage for many women leads to the death of the self. The final strange twist is that we suddenly realize that we have been treated to a narrative from beyond the grave since our narrator is now dead. The liminality of Alice’s floating body has been translated into the liminality of the perplexing text which could never have been written for, as Elisabeth Bronfen has noted, ‘It is precisely in the impossibility of this linguistic utterance (“I say to you that I am dead”) that the encroachment of death on life is celebrated and at the same time literally foreclosed.’33 This ‘impossibility’, however, is not only characteristic of Gothic writing, which often presents us with disembodied voices, but is also a strong feature of magical realist texts in which the voices of the dead

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frequently speak – and with the same, if not more, authority than those of the living, from beyond the grave. Alice dies when she is unable to sustain the dissociation of levitation and comes down ‘amongst the people’, ‘hundreds of milling people’, whom she has heard making animal noises and who, animal-like, trample her to death (VD, p. 187). In both Gothic and magical realist writing the boundaries between the dead and the living are made permeable. The difference, perhaps, is that the Gothic renders such permeability sinister (thus expressing an anxiety about the fragility of the subject) whereas the magical realist text celebrates (often joyfully or comically) such fluidity (thus expressing a desire for change in the construction of the subject). What we have in the comic Gothic text is something in between. The Vet’s Daughter finally reveals itself to be a spectral text, written from beyond the grave in order to speak the truth about the father and healer of animals. Working on the cusp where horror and humour and the Gothic and the magically real meet, Comyns’s novel powerfully gives shape to the experience of being a victim – for Alice, like Hoffmann’s Olympia, never breaks free of the puppet-master’s control. Dougal Douglas in Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) is not, however, a phantasmal figure in a spectral text; on the contrary, the ebullient role he plays in the novel depends upon his very corporeality, a corporeality which, like that of Dracula, bears traces of the uncanny written on the body. However, in this comic Gothic text, demonic characteristics are drawn lightly and parodically; as Judy Newman has noted, in writing about John Updike’s fiction, there is indeed a strong contemporary tendency to view the devil as comic.34 Dougal seems to be in touch with an arcane knowledge beyond the reach of mere mortals and his human status remains ambiguous. The element of performance is central to Spark’s representation of the demonic Dougal: a rather camp individual, he performs for an audience, exploiting the discrepancy between that which is apparent to the everyday senses and that which emanates from darker unseen forces. Between the two comes the play of illusion that is the realm of the trickster, a figure of folklore. Dougal’s trickster-like qualities alert us to the relationship between Gothic and older forms of belief and writing which blur the boundary between the world of the everyday senses and the realm that lies beyond it. We might argue that Spark thus draws both upon Gothic traditions and these pre-enlightenment beliefs to create a distinctive mode of comic Gothic: a Gothic that is creative rather than destructive, liberating rather than redemptive and comic rather than terrifying.

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Spark’s novel, like that of Comyns, has a very specific historical and cultural setting. The action takes place in Peckham, a working-class area of South London in the 1950s, and depicts a society bearing only the superficial vestiges of a Christian morality and given over to secular materialism and mass production. In Spark’s Peckham people are known by their functions in the local factory (for example, ‘Odette Hill, uptwister, and Lucille Potter, gummer’)35 and love is measured out in the coffee spoons of a well-equipped new bungalow for the aspiring new bride. Spark’s choice of location is not random for, as the novel belatedly reminds us, it was on the open expanse of Peckham Rye that Blake experienced his vision of the angel in the tree. Humphrey, an ordinary young man, eventually marries his ‘material girl’, Dixie, and observes: it was a sunny day for November, and, as he drove swiftly past the Rye, he saw the children playing there and the women coming home from work with their shopping-bags, the Rye for an instant looking like a cloud of green and gold, the people seeming to ride upon it, as you might say there was another world than this. (BPR, p. 143) Into the waste land of Peckham comes one Dougal Douglas, an MA from Edinburgh University (quite a rare commodity at the time), and from the start an alien, exotic presence. Employed by the local factory because the manager believes ‘the time has come to take on an Arts man’, Dougal proceeds to sow doubt and dissatisfaction among those he encounters, forcing them by his anarchic presence to look again at themselves and their lives and indeed to think the unthinkable. Thus the novel opens with Humphrey seeking out Dixie (having walked out on their wedding a few weeks before) and prompting a woman to remark, ‘It wouldn’t have happened if Dougal Douglas hadn’t come here’ (BPR, p. 9). Who or what is Dougal Douglas? Physically he is seductively odd: he dwelt with a dark glow on Mr Druce, he raised his right shoulder, which was already highly crooked by nature, and leaned on his elbow with a becoming twist of the body. (BPR, p. 15) His physical presence is marked by traces of the uncanny. On his head there are ‘two small bumps among his curls’; his explanation for these is that he had ‘a pair of horns like a goat’ when he was born and ‘lost them in a fight at a later date’ (BPR, p. 114) or, as he explains on

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another occasion, had had an operation to remove them (BPR, p. 77). There are hints (but no more than hints) of an ability to change shape and form. His antics in the ballroom – when he moves in quick succession from the Highland Fling to, among other things, miming a man in a rowing boat, a Zulu warrior, a Chinese coolie, a cyclist, an old woman with an umbrella, a fisherman, a racing driver and then finally the band leader – meet with short shrift from the manager. This succession of charades, however, intimates the shape-shifting quality of Dougal’s identity. Certainly, the people of Peckham do not know what to make of Dougal. Described variously as ‘a pansy’ (BPR, p. 57) and ‘a sex maniac’ (BPR, p. 56), he emanates an ambiguous sexuality that he uses to full advantage, observing of Mr Druce, ‘I’m his first waking experience of an attractive man’ (BPR, p. 100). Sexual charisma is thus an important aspect of his persona. Dougal’s potentially multiple identity is translated into his working life when he simultaneously takes on a post at a rival firm, calling himself Douglas Dougal. Is he the Devil? He confides in Humphrey the contents of a dream: of girls in factories doing a dance with only the movements of their breasts, bottoms and arms as they sort, pack, check, cone-wind, gum, uptwist, assemble, seam and set. I see the Devil in the guise of a chap from Cambridge who does motion-study and he’s the choreographer.. . . And . . . of course this choreographer is a projection of me. I was at the University of Edinburgh myself, but in the dream I’m the Devil and Cambridge. (BPR, p. 50) However, unlike the levitation episodes of The Vet’s Daughter, there is nothing that Dougal is or does that cannot be explained away rationally. He is rather a figure of hint and suggestion, intimating the power of the figurative in a world that appears to have become determinedly literal. Just as the form of Spark’s text harks back to the older traditions of the ballad narrative, Dougal embodies older traditions of belief and indeed superstition. His bodily form, while recognizably human, is necessarily bizarre. He is in effect a Gothic body. For Alan Bold, writing about Spark in 1986, he is ‘a peculiarly Scottish Devil’, versed in the ‘chameleon art of changing his appearance’ and reminiscent of Gilmartin in James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner.36 Dougal is not, he goes on to claim, ‘Satan come to plague the world’. Rather: He is built on a smaller scale than that, being content to work on the already suspect morality of a somewhat unsavoury part of London. If

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Dougal did not exist . . . the people of Peckham would have to invent him; the reader is persuaded that Spark has given Peckham the sort of devil it deserves.37 This is perhaps a rather negative view of Dougal but one that his own words seem to endorse: ‘I’m only supposed to be one of the wicked spirits that wander the world for the ruin of souls’ (BPR, p. 77). In many ways, Dougal resembles the trickster that Jung identified as an archetype of folk mythology. The trickster-hero is often an ambiguous figure who within a single society may be seen as having both god-like attributes and a disarming innocence, and may be regarded as an evil agent of destruction or as a relatively harmless mischief-maker. The trickster could be said to serve as a scapegoat figure carrying the burden of the failings of the society from which he emerges. In The Trickster, edited by the American anthropologist Paul Radin, a commentary by Jung identifies unconsciousness as the chief and alarming characteristic of the trickster, whom he considers the forerunner of the Saviour.38 Jarold Ramsey’s description of the Trickster in native American mythologies as ‘greedy, over-sexed, selfish, covetous, aggressively mischievous, capable of wiliness and cleverness but only on a short-term and overreaching basis’ fits Dougal very well. One of the main functions of the trickster, according to Ramsey, is ‘to create narrative possibility in the face of tribal restraints and norms of good citizenship’.39 Thus the trickster is not merely a figure of negation but one that carries with it the possibility of liberation from restrictive norms. While not identifying Dougal explicitly with the trickster, other critics writing on Spark do seem to discuss him in these terms. Peter Kemp, writing in the 1970s, takes a rather more positive line than Alan Bold: ‘Dougal’s function in the book is to apply the goad, create moments of truth by engineering situations in which characters are forced to experience the sharp facts of life.’40 Likewise Karl Malkoff recognizes a positive role for Dougal: ‘What Dougal offers is freedom from the confines of artificial moralities: he preaches respect for oneself that must precede respect for others.’41 Characters’ responses to Dougal depend upon their own capacity to accept various kinds of liberation. By constituting a challenge to the Protestant work ethic that seems to hold Peckham in thrall, he provides a glimpse of what might happen when restraints are removed. He does offer up to Humphrey, for example, the possibility of refusing to embark upon an arid marriage, a possibility only renounced after Dougal’s departure. He remains a comic figure in a comic text; the misfortunes experienced by those he encounters

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are attributable more to their own culpability than to his direct demonic intervention, and their tragedies (even the most extreme, Mr Druce’s murder of his secretary and lover, Merle Coverdale) are narrated with a detachment that denies pity or fear to the reader. Instead, much of the action is focalized through Dougal himself and it is more tempting to empathize with his ingenious means of avoiding real work than it is to feel sympathy for the residents of Peckham, trapped as they are (according to Dougal’s analysis) by ‘four types of morality: one, emotional. Two, functional. Three, puritanical. Four, Christian’ (BPR, p. 83). In one of the most distinctly Gothic tropes of the novel, it is Dougal himself who must make his escape from the oppressions of Peckham through the labyrinthine confines of the newly excavated Nunhead tunnel (formerly used by the nuns of the Order of St Bridget and the site of ‘some interesting remains’). Parodically, he now becomes the Gothic victim. Before he can make good his escape he must defeat an old adversary and scourge, Trevor Lomas. To do this, he employs yet again his physical idiosyncrasies and mobility to good effect in a comically grotesque encounter: Trevor caught up with him and delivered to Dougal a stab in the eye with a bone. Whereupon Dougal flashed his torch in Trevor’s face and leapt at him with his high shoulder raised and elbow sticking out. He applied once more his deformed speciality. Holding Trevor’s throat with this right-hand twist, he fetched him a lefthand blow on the corner of the jaw. Trevor sat down. Dougal picked up his bags, pointing his torch to the ground, and emerged from the tunnel at Gordon Road. There he reported to the policeman on duty that the electrician was sitting in a dazed condition among the nuns’ old bones, having been overcome by the heat. (BPR, p. 140) Dougal, on the other hand, emerges slightly scathed but victoriously untrammelled to pursue his picaresque career as a free spirit. The Ballad of Peckham Rye is an irreverent and entertaining comic Gothic novel, a useful exemplar of Fred Botting’s claim that: 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.42

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Acting as what we might call a catalytic converter within a novel of comic Gothic turns, Dougal is the uncanny presence through which Spark probes the stifling constraints of Christianity and conservative morality in a community in thrall to material values. However, it is not until the 1980s, in the wake of the second women’s movement, that we meet a female devil who can match Dougal’s ability to challenge conventional ideas and expectations.

5 Women Writing Women

Writing in 1979, Patricia Stubbs identified a problem encountered by feminist writers at the end of the nineteenth century as still having relevance for the current generation of women writers. ‘This’, she claims: is a difficulty peculiar to realist fiction – that of how to incorporate it into a form whose essential characteristic is the exploration of existing realities, experiences and aspirations which go well beyond the possibilities afforded by that reality. . . . This explains the increasing importance of non-realist linear narrative forms in contemporary women’s writing. She cites Monique Wittig, Beryl Bainbridge, Angela Carter and Patricia Highsmith as writers who write in fantasy modes in order to evade this constraint.1 Those feminist writers of fiction who remained within realist paradigms found themselves writing narratives of victimhood: Margaret Drabble’s heroines are an interesting example. ‘This, above all, to refuse to be a victim’, says Margaret Atwood’s nameless narrator at the end of her 1972 novel Surfacing.2 In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of women novelists did just that and found in the traditions of Gothic the potential for writing transgression that challenged patriarchal assumptions and expectations in the late twentieth-century context. In Gothic’s hybridity they discovered ways of opening up parodic spaces to comic and liberating effect. Through self-reflexive and parodic writing they challenged the scripts of femininity as they manifested themselves through religion, culture and fiction itself. We shall be looking in this chapter at work by women novelists who draw on the traditions of Gothic and the way in which they employ the comic turn. Our first example of this is Hilary Mantel’s inversion of the motif of the villainous man of religion and 116

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the persecuted female as found in texts such as The Monk. We then turn our attention to the emergence of the empowered monstrous female as in Fay Weldon’s novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry and Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’. Finally, we consider two texts that question the signifying power of Gothic itself: Margaret Atwood’s respectful parody of the ‘lion-taming’ of popular Gothic in her 1976 novel, Lady Oracle, and Angela Carter’s rewriting of Gothic tales in The Bloody Chamber, especially her tale of the nosferatu, ‘The Lady of the House of Love’. Hilary Mantel’s 1989 novel, Fludd, takes us out of the city space but not quite into the rural. Mantel sets her story in the kind of territory that was to be used in the 1990s to such gruesome comic Gothic effect in the television series The League of Gentleman.3 Contrasting with Spark’s Peckham, the 1950s world of Fludd is an only slightly caricatured version of Hilary Mantel’s childhood home in that part of the Peak District in North West England which looks towards Manchester rather than Sheffield. This is alien territory even to those English who are used to the gentler landscapes of southern England. Those more familiar with this part of northern England will, if they remember the 1950s, see it as only a little out of focus. The inhabitants of Fetherhoughton (and its even more primitive neighbour, Netherhoughton) do not look to the moors for a glimpse of the sublime. It is ‘the mark of an outsider’ to find ‘a wild dignity and grandeur in the landscape’; ‘they were not Emily Brontë, nor were they paid to be . . . the moors were the vast cemetery of their imagination’.4 In case we are tempted to see this world as a figment of Mantel’s imagination, the narrator then adds a piece of gruesome fact: ‘Later there were notorious murders in the vicinity, and real bodies were buried there’ (F, p. 12), a reference, presumably to the notorious ‘Moors Murders’ case involving the torture and murder of several children by Terence Brady and Myra Hindley. The northwest of England is famed for recusancy, keeping Roman Catholicism alive when banned by the state, and the powerful presence of the Catholic Church is in keeping with other aspects of verisimilitude apparent in Mantel’s novel. However, religion in Fetherhoughton demonstrates a fakery and excess that clearly characterizes it as Gothic in the most performative sense. The Church of St Thomas Aquinas has been built by an architect ‘with a Shakespearian sense of history, with a grand contempt of the pitfalls of anachronism’. ‘Only’, comments the narrator, ‘such a vision could have commanded into being the music-hall medievalism of St. Thomas Aquinas’ (F, p. 16). Challenging a reforming Bishop’s demand that he remove statues of saints which had graced the

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local church, Father Angwin remarks, ‘These people aren’t Christians. These people are heathens and Catholics’ (F, p. 22). Shoring up the presence of the church are the nuns, headed by Mother Perpetua who believes that ‘Protestants were damned’ and that after their brief span of seventy years ‘then devils will tear their flesh with pincers’ (F, p. 15). Fludd is a story of liberation through a sexual awakening brought about by an ambiguous and uncanny figure, the eponymous Fludd. Closeted in the convent and performing all its menial chores is Sister Philomena, ‘A fine strong girl . . . A true daughter of the Irish soil’, says Mother Perpetua (F, p. 32). Sister Philomena, trapped by a way of life chosen for her by her family, is wasting in spirit, however.5 Into this environment comes one night the mysterious stranger, assumed to be the new curate, who identifies himself merely as ‘Fludd’. For the alert reader this unusual name will carry resonances, not least because she or he will have read the note at the beginning of the novel: The real Fludd (1574–1637) was a physician, scholar and alchemist. In alchemy, everything has a literal and factual description, and in addition a description that is symbolic and fantastical. The historical Fludd tended towards the mystical rather than the experimental and in his time he was criticized widely as a magician and for his occult beliefs. Mantel’s less ascetic Fludd, however, seems to be able to exercise some very desirable controls over matter: the level in his whisky glass remains constant however much he drinks and the fire never seems in need of replenishment. Bodily comfort is very much part of his brief in spite of the Gothic aspect of his initial appearance one dark stormy night as Father Angwin’s housekeeper opens the door: ‘Before her was a tall, dim shape, a man wrapped in a dark cloak, holes for mouth and eyes, a hat pulled over the brow . . .’ (F, p. 42). His corporeal presence suggests the uncanny: his fingers are described as being ‘bloodless’ and ‘pointed’ (F, pp. 45–46); he has a ‘corpse-like pallor’ (p. 106); he can see in the dark and Miss Dempsey, the housekeeper, finds it difficult to hold a recollection of what he actually looks like. Rather later, Miss Dempsey experiences a ‘whisper at the back of her mind, and only he could have put it there: I have come to transform you, transformation is my business’ (F, p. 55). It becomes apparent as the novel progresses that Fludd’s role is indeed transformational and emancipatory in a manner that is less ambiguous than that of Dougal in Peckham. He sees evidence of the occult on his visit to Netherhoughton: ‘all about him he saw the lively signs of alchemy’

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(F, p. 63) but finds his subject in the hapless Sister Philomena. As they shelter from the elements together, he reflects: Can it be . . . that the transformative process is already underway? In these days he no longer worked in metal, but practised on human nature; an art less predictable, more gratifying, more dangerous. The scientist burns up his experimental matter in the athenor, or furnace, but no scientist, however accomplished, can light that furnace himself. The spark must be set by a shaft of celestial light; and in waiting for that light, a man could waste his life. (F, p. 105) He seems to have abandoned his earlier trade which he describes to Sister Philomena as a ‘deep science’ and one which was concerned with ‘releasing spirit from matter’ (F, p. 109). He refutes the teachings of the renunciation of the flesh which have governed her life up to this point, arguing instead that ‘we must accommodate our bodies . . . find some good in them’ (F, p. 107). He eventually succeeds in showing Sister Philomena that spiritual progress through an acknowledgement of the flesh. Enabling her escape from Fetherhoughton, he introduces her to the pleasures of physical love and transforms her back into her former self, Roisin O’Halloran, with her life before her and a seemingly bottomless bag of money which she sees as ‘no ordinary coin or common gold’ but as being ‘like love’ (F, p. 181). Having done this, he disappears as suddenly and mysteriously as he had arrived. Fludd is an inverted Coppelius, a benevolent Coppola. He deals in transformation but rather than appearing as the agent of disintegration and madness, he reintegrates the body with the spirit and makes whole. In comparison with other notable Gothic figures like Dracula whose uncanny bodies transgress the normal boundaries of the human, he is not a destructive force but an emancipatory one, intervening in a Gothic world of oppression and anxiety. In the case of Miss Dempsey, for example, he magically arranges the removal of a troublesome wart from her face and places it, more deservedly, on the face of the cruel Sister Perpetua. This visitor from an earlier age (whose very presence indicates that he must have found the secret of longevity, if not immortality) testifies to a decline in spiritual belief. ‘There was a time’, he tells Father Angwin, ‘when the air was packed with spirits, like flies on an August day. Now I find that the air is empty. There is only man and his concerns’ (F, p. 127). Father Angwin and Fludd recall the pre-enlightenment days of multiple devils, a belief still held by Miss Dempsey and viewed sympathetically by the priest, who having lost his faith in God, cannot

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believe in the Devil as an alternative supreme being either. In so far as the Devil exists in Fetherhoughton, he takes for Father Angwin the aspect of a tobacconist from Netherhoughton called Judd McEvoy. In this post-enlightenment world, where religion persists in its outward forms as a Gothic entity, body and spirit are both oppressed. Mantel’s novel executes a full comic turn, but its festive happy ending is freedom, not marriage. As Roisin O’Halloran hurries to the station after her weekend of passion with Fludd in a Manchester hotel, she thinks to herself, ‘Back to Ireland. On a boat. If I liked. Or not’ (F, p. 183). Fludd’s credentials as a feminist novel are open to debate. There is a potent white male at its centre whose intervention is essential before Sister Philomena can be liberated back into her former identity as Roisin O’Halloran. As the novel is set in the 1950s, this might be considered to be entirely consistent with the realities of the time. But Fludd is no ordinary man; he carries marks of the uncanny. Instead of inspiring dread, however, he unsettles the metanarrative of an oppressive and fossilized religious dogma and the social practices that accompany it. Symbolically freed from these narratives, the woman in the text goes out into the world. By the 1970s, women were not looking to men to be saved – ‘wimmin’ were doing it for themselves. The sexual politics of the three decades between the time it is set and the date of the novel’s publication are thus put into perspective by its challenge to the grand narrative of religion and the implications it held for gender. The tendency of postmodern fiction to plunder history appears in flamboyant form, as we shall see, in Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, which also brings a seventeenth-century figure of a very different kind into the present day. Fludd ends with a reflection on a painting, a Virgin and Child by Ambrogio Bergognone. The Madonna here is reading the First Psalm: ‘For the Lord knoweth the ways of the just; and the ways of the wicked shall perish’ is the text. By way of a final joke, the novel ends with the words: The Virgin’s expression, at first sight, seems unfathomably sad. It is only on closer observation that one notices the near smirk on her dimpled mouth, and the expression of satisfaction in her long, dun-coloured eyes. (F, pp. 185–186) A very knowing Madonna, this one; there is something going on behind this stereotype. If the Madonna is one side of a powerful sexual stereotype inherited by the twentieth century, the whore is the other side of that binary. Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’,

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originally published in her Fireworks collection in 1974 and reprinted in an anthology of short stories by women she edited in 1986 (called, significantly, Wayward Girls and Wicked Women), gives expression to the fear that such demonizing of female sexuality implies. This story, like a number of texts we have looked at, uses the figure of the artificial human being and relates the transformation of a marionette into a living woman. Lady Purple is the star of a travelling carnival sideshow operated by the puppet-master, a Coppola/Spalanzani figure, named only as ‘the Asiatic Professor’. The action takes place in ‘a dark superstitious Transylvania’, a place they had reached after he had ‘played his play in many beautiful cities that no longer exist’.6 Lady Purple is no Olympia, the passive beauty. On the contrary, she is ‘Queen of the Night’ dressed in ‘deep, dark, slumbrous colours – profound pinks, crimson and the vibrating purple with which she was synonymous, a purple the colour of blood in a love suicide’ (WGWW, pp. 256–257). It is the Professor who fills her ‘with necromantic vigour’ (WGWW, p. 257) as she enacts the life story of The Notorious Amours of Lady Purple, the Shameless Oriental Venus. The prescribed actions of this tale cover all manner of sexual depravity culminating in graphic scenes of necrophilia; Lady Purple is the repository of male fantasy that can be acted out in the frame of the theatre, with the puppet then put safely away. One night, the Professor goes to kiss his doll goodnight as usual and ‘his withered mouth opened on hot, wet, palpitating flesh’ (WGWW, p. 264). The marionette has come to life (taking the breath and, vampirically, the blood of the old man) and she sets about replicating in the world of the flesh those events that she had repeatedly acted out in the puppet show. Carter’s narrator poses the question: Even if she could not perceive it, she could not escape the tautological paradox in which she was trapped; had the marionette all the time parodied the living or was she, now living, to parody her own performance as a marionette? Although she was now manifestly a woman, young and extravagantly beautiful, the leprous whiteness of her face gave her the appearance of a corpse animated solely by demonic will. (WGWW, p. 266) Carter’s prototypical she-devil, who is to become fully incarnate in Weldon’s novel, begins in like manner. She burns down the scene of her oppression. In the last paragraph of the tale, however, she is seen as making for the nearest brothel ‘like a homing pigeon, out of logical necessity’ (WGWW, p. 266). Thus Carter uses the figure of the puppet

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come to life to show the destructive potential of an unleashed vengeful femininity. Two novels of the 1980s place at their centre women who are not only vengeful but also monstrous. Fay Weldon’s 1983 novel, Life and Loves of a She-Devil, also demonstrates the transgression of a number of boundaries in its portrayal of a woman who refuses to be a victim. Like Atwood’s Lady Oracle, it features female characters who read and write fictions for women. Mary Fisher’s success in writing best-selling romantic novels enables her to live a life of luxury with no domestic ties or responsibilities. Ruth Patchett, who subsumes Mary’s identity into her own via a complex act of revenge, also eventually writes a romantic novel. However, as she changes her life, Ruth learns not only to manipulate fictional characters but also, like Gibbons’s Flora Poste, the destinies of those around her so that she is able to refuse the role of victim as defined in popular women’s romantic fiction and in traditional Gothic texts. This change in Ruth is motivated by despair and then anger at her husband’s affair with the best-selling novelist who is, in every way, her opposite. Whereas Ruth is dark and six foot two inches tall with a jutting jaw, sunken eyes and hooked nose, Mary Fisher is, like the traditional passive heroine, ‘small and pretty and delicately formed, prone to fainting and weeping’.7 Whereas Ruth lives a conventional life as a housewife and mother in a new house on a new estate, Mary Fisher lives in a converted tower on the coast with servants to see to her every need. Whereas Ruth is economically dependent on her husband, Mary is rich and independent. Whereas Ruth is a victim, Mary is empowered and (it seems) in charge of her own destiny. All this begins to be reversed when, incensed by his wife’s domestic ineptitude and her failure to remain happy and contented in this subservient role, Bobbo calls his wife a she-devil. Meant to shock and disorientate her, the insult has the reverse effect: in fact, it liberates Ruth from the roles she has felt obliged to shoulder for so many years: But this is wonderful! This is exhilarating! If you are a she-devil the mind clears at once. The spirits rise. There is no shame, no guilt, no dreary striving to be good. There is only, in the end, what you want. And I can take what I want. I am a she-devil! (SD, p. 43) At this point, Ruth stops being a figure of pity and becomes Ruthless. Taking what she wants prompts her to burn down the family home and to wreak a series of revengeful acts upon her rival. These culminate in Mary Fisher being saddled with Ruth and Bobbo’s two unpleasant children

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and in her becoming the carer of her elderly, cantankerous mother who was formerly resident (at Mary’s expense) in a home. Tired and stripped of her glamour, Mary ceases to be sexually attractive to Bobbo, who embarks on affairs with other women. Meanwhile, Ruth gradually swindles her husband out of his money and radically changes her physical appearance through a series of cosmetic operations so that she finally becomes, quite literally, Mary Fisher’s double. Mary, faced with a life of domestic drudgery and poverty, loses her ability to write successful romantic fiction, contracts cancer and dies. By the end of the novel, Ruth is physically beautiful, immensely rich, and has reversed her former situation so that she is now the powerful one, with her husband at her beck and call. She has also proved to herself that she can write women’s romantic fiction, but decides not to publish it: ‘Enough to know I can do it, if I want. It was not so difficult after all; nor she so special’ (SD, p. 240). Weldon’s work, a darker, more fantastic and ultimately more wicked tale than that of Gibbons or Atwood’s Lady Oracle, is lion-taming with a vengeance. The complexity of Weldon’s novel lies in the way it explores the relationship between women’s romantic fiction, Gothic plots and aspects of victimhood, masochism, power and control as played out between male and female characters. It is, like Lady Oracle, a self-reflexive novel, deeply immersed in the negotiations between writers and readers. Mary Fisher’s success as a novelist depends on her continuing to produce romantic fictions ‘about the nature of love’ (SD, p. 49) in which the plots and closures offer predictable fulfilments of female sexual fantasies. It is significant, of course, that ‘sales of Mary Fisher’s books were good in Bradwell Park’ (SD, p. 169), a poor and featureless city suburb. At the same time, however, this politically correct attitude towards women’s ‘escapist’ literature is itself parodied through Weldon’s portrayal of Molly Wishant, another of Ruth’s alter egos, who persuades a priest, Father Ferguson, into a ‘Theory of Literary Responsibility’ whilst simultaneously seducing him for her own ends. The same textual ambivalence surrounds Weldon’s heroine, who refuses the cultural fantasy of romantic love and focuses on alternative narratives that give her access to economic and social power. The sting in the tale for feminist readers, however, is that she acquires these not just by exercising a financial canniness that keeps her independent of male support but also by becoming beautiful through cosmetic surgery in what looks like a capitulation to the beauty myth. For some feminist readers, Ruth’s ruthless transformation of herself into the double of Mary Fisher in order to gain power over men offers an uncomfortable collusion with, rather than rejection of, patriarchal

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values. However, it is possible to see Ruth in her final state as someone who, despite the fact she looks like Mary Fisher, is armed with a self-knowledge and a cultural understanding that Mary Fisher never possessed and which will protect her against exploitation. This selfknowledge has involved a rejection of Mary Fisher’s naïve belief in romantic love and, in the spirit of Atwood’s Foster, an experimentation with plural identities. Indeed, the curious last sentence indicates an embrace of doubleness as a mode of survival: ‘I am a lady of six foot two, who had tucks taken in her legs. A comic turn, turned serious.’ The novel, in foregrounding intertextuality with various works that deal with both inner and outer transformation (such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale), signals its engagement with the idea of bodily metamorphosis and changed identities. In transforming herself into a beautiful and successful woman, Ruth can be seen as signing a Faustian pact. However, this She-Devil brings with her not only a whiff of sulphur but also a radical manifesto that, in Susanne Becker’s words, ‘defamiliarizes (the) accepted order’ and ‘modifies the arguments of masochism and escape that still influence even the latest Gothic criticism’. If, as Becker claims, Gothicism ‘points to the violence of the body politic and to women’s bodies’, then Weldon’s novel offers us a heroine who chooses to do violence to her own body in order to empower herself in a world in which gender relations still disadvantage women.8 The Gothic text’s concern with shifting and unstable subjectivities is here itself exploited in order to offer a more liberating narrative for women readers. Weldon’s novel also predicts a world, however, in which the concept of stable identity is put under erasure through cosmetic manipulation of the body and a world in which gender is seen as a matter of performance, rather than essence or even acculturation. Situating itself within emerging discourses of the body, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil can thus be seen as both a reactive and a prophetic text. Sounding an alarm about the spreading use of plastic surgery by women in order to pursue a physical ideal, the novel raises questions concerning women’s collusion with masculine fantasies of the perfect feminine body. Satirizing feminist 1970s narratives of female authenticity (particularly through its depiction of the separatist feminist commune entitled ‘Wimmin’ in Chapter 29), it rejects the notion that women are ‘naturally’ more selfless or kinder than men; indeed, it is Ruth’s embrace of hatred that transforms and energizes her. The hatred that presents itself in serious Gothic as a destructive force here saves Ruth from despair and further victimization.

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The novel thus rejects any narrative that embraces essentialism, whether of the spirit or the body: ‘“There is no such thing as the essential self”, said Mr. Genghis (Ruth’s plastic surgeon). “It is all essential, and all liable to change and flux, and usually the better for it”’ (SD, p. 219). The novel therefore anticipates the art of Orlan, in which the body of the artist becomes the plastic medium through which the performance of identity is physically enacted and its instability demonstrated. Arguably, it also presages work by Judith Butler (Gender Trouble [1990]) and Judith Halberstam (Female Masculinity [1998]), both of whom consider gender identity as performance rather than essence. When we remember that Ruth uses a photograph of Mary Fisher as the model for her new appearance, it makes us think again about the modern phenomenon of simulation and what one critic has described as ‘our near-total imprisonment in the “hyperreal”’.9 At the same time, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil allows us both to laugh at Ruth’s excesses and to consider the horror of how artificial her final identity seems to be. Our anxiety about the artificiality of Frankenstein’s monster has thus been translated into a more ambivalent response and inflected with feminist issues. Powerful transgressive women made notable appearances in women’s fiction throughout the 1980s. In 1988, Jean Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry introduced the Dog-Woman to English fiction in a novel categorized in The Sunday Times’s review as ‘Gothic Farce’.10 In writing about the book, Winterson describes the Dog-Woman as ‘a huge and monstrous creature with a powerful right hook and a wide vocabulary. She is perhaps the only woman in English fiction confident enough to use filth as a fashion accessory.’11 Winterson’s postmodern novel tells the tale of Jordan, fished from the Thames by the Dog-Woman (so-called because she races dogs at Hyde Park) and reared affectionately by her until he joins the explorer John Tradescant (a genuine figure from history) in his voyages. The narrative alternates between the voices of the Dog-Woman and Jordan, who travels both literally and creatively, telling the stories of the twelve dancing princesses he has imagined. There is a specific historical setting, covering that period of the seventeenth century in which Charles I was executed and both the plague and the Great Fire swept through London. There is a clear intertext in the form of Ben Jonson’s 1631 play, Bartholomew Fair. As with all comic turns, the telling is crucial. The Dog-Woman narrates her own grotesqueness, which she revels in. She is massive, she is hideous, she is filthy. No man is a match for her; she is afraid of no one. ‘How hideous am I?’ she asks.12 By way of answer, she tells us:

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My nose is flat, my eyebrows are heavy. I have only a few teeth and those are a poor show, being black and broken. I had smallpox when I was a girl and the caves in my face are home enough for fleas. (SC, p. 24) She is of Swiftean proportions, out of scale with the rest of the world and her exploits are sometimes surrealistic: she is heavy enough to shoot an elephant off a see-saw and into the sky, for example (SC, p. 25). The Dog-Woman’s sense of identity comes through pride in her monstrous appearance, her physical power and her independence. She does not see herself through the eyes of men and continues to remain surprised at their weakness and inadequacy. As a child she had broken her father’s legs when he had swung her on to his lap to tell her a story (SC, p. 25). She tells too of how she had attempted to have sex with a man but when she had breathed in, trying to tighten her muscles so he could find where he was, she had ‘pulled him in, balls and everything’. He had had to be prised out with a crowbar; then, attempting oral sex, he admitted defeat: ‘I cannot take that orange in my mouth. It will not fit’ (SC, pp. 106–107). It is only after she has bitten off a man’s penis that she discovers they do not grow again: ‘This seems a great mistake on the part of nature, since men are so careless with their members and will put them anywhere without thinking’ (SC, p. 106). Many of the comic effects of Sexing the Cherry, therefore, derive from the naïve narrative voice of the Dog-Woman, who is in some ways a Candide figure in a world of corruption and in others an avenging angel against the agents of cant and hypocrisy, in the form of the Puritans. She gouges out the eyes and pulls the teeth of those she comes across, having taken too literally the ‘eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ teachings of the preacher after the King’s execution. Unable to stand the shock expressed by the rest of the congregation when she empties the contents of her sack on the floor (119 eyeballs, one missing on account of a man who had lost one already, and over 2000 teeth), she is hurt: ‘I set off alone, and fed the eyeballs to my dogs and used the teeth as drainage for my watercress bed’ (SC, p. 85). The scene in the brothel when she dismembers and decapitates Firebrace and Scroggins with an axe in revenge for the death of the King is notable for its excessive violence, culminating in a scene of necrophilia as ‘an eager crowd of good gentlemen poured in, anxious to disport themselves among these ruins’ and one mounts the decapitated Scroggins from behind. She washes herself and strips naked: ‘No one saw me. Like the angels, I can be invisible when there is work to be done’ (SC, p. 89).

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Sara Martin, in a 1999 article, sees nothing humorous or satirical in these episodes and claims that ‘women’s dream of power can only lead to creating monsters, no matter how effective they may be in redressing the wrongs of monstrous patriarchy’.13 For her, Winterson’s monster cannot be taken as a role model for she is ‘as violent and narrowminded as any patriarchal man’; it is not clear, she believes, whether the Dog-Woman is a parody ‘of the excesses of feminism or of patriarchy’.14 Martin’s view is that ‘the grotesque – the comic monstrous is chosen over the horrific because it is easier to deal with comedy than with horror’ and what is missing both in Sexing the Cherry and in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (and she brackets Carter’s Nights at the Circus with these two novels) is the power to make women face up to the monster in themselves, to ‘the monstrous traits inherent in being human’.15 While it is entirely credible to argue that the Dog-Woman does not make a good role model for feminists and even that Winterson tempers her monstrosity through the comic perspective, this does not mean that she cannot represent metaphorically that which women in the contemporary world must internalize before they can challenge the iniquities of the present day. In Sexing the Cherry, the harnessing of the Dog-Woman’s strength and purity of purpose comes in the final phase of the novel. Here the leap forward into the late twentieth century presents a nameless woman who feels this seventeenth-century figure as massive inside her; this gives her the strength to become an eco-warrior, standing out against the evils of global capitalism: ‘I had an alter ego who was huge and powerful, a woman whose only morality was her own and whose loyalties were fierce and few’ (SC, p. 125). This is the Gothic world of the doppelgänger, represented in Winterson’s novel not simply as a feeling but as an uncanny time slip in which the present-day heroine sees her ‘forearms resting on the wall. They were massive, like thighs, but there was no wall, just a wooden spit, and when I turned in the opposite direction I couldn’t see the dome of St Paul’s’ (SC, p. 128). When this present-day heroine burns down a building, it is not the domestic space (as in Jane Eyre or even The Adventures of Harry Richmond) but a polluting factory symbolic of global capitalism. Weldon’s and Winterson’s appropriation of Gothic for these monstrous and comic purposes and Mantel’s subtler and more reflective but equally as funny challenge to orthodoxy suggest that women writers were able to find creative ways to engage with the Gothic mode in the 1980s. Margaret Atwood was also to adopt the doppelgänger theme that underlies the Weldon and Winterson novels in The Robber Bride (1993). This is a very different kind of novel from Winterson’s postmodern fractured

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narrative and Weldon’s fairy story. Atwood uses realist techniques to build up a convincing picture of the lives of three women in late twentieth-century Toronto, spanning twenty years. Into these lives, however, at various times has irrupted Zenia, a much more subtle monster than the Dog-Woman. Normal sized and attractive to men, Zenia is flesh and blood: there is nothing supernatural about her. Although we do not know who she is (she has a number of different stories about her identity), we see what she does. The Robber Bride, as its title suggests, situates itself in relation to traditional narratives, and is a sophisticated and complex text, demonstrating that Atwood had also found that Gothic tropes could be revitalized to comic and challenging effect. In 1976, Atwood had published a novel that subjected both the reading and writing of the mass-market Gothic romances that were so popular at the time to parodic treatment. For Sybil Korff Vincent, writing in the landmark collection of essays edited by Juliann Fleenor in 1983, The Female Gothic, Atwood had created a new sub-genre, the Comic/Gothic.16 The heroine of the ‘sinister and jokey’17 Lady Oracle, Joan Foster, is acknowledged as a successful writer both in commercial terms if pseudonymously as the author of mass-market Gothics (or ‘bodice rippers’) and in literary critical circles where she is hailed as a ‘cross between Khalil Gibran and Rod McKuen’.18 In contrast with The Heroine and even the better known Cold Comfort Farm, this novel still enjoys a wide readership and has a substantial body of critical commentary. It is, like those other two texts, a self-reflexive novel, deeply immersed in the negotiations between writing and readerships. Atwood’s own comments on the novel indicate an acute self-awareness in the project and the subsequent body of criticism that has emerged suggests that the feminist reader is readily able to recognize in Atwood’s work that textual space we have seen at work in both Barrett and Gibbons. Joan Foster is one of Atwood’s unreliable first person narrators who appears at the opening of the novel in Italy, in flight from the complications of a multiple literary and personal life after having staged a fake suicide in Lake Ontario. As this ‘heroine-in-flight’, she narrates the stories of her life while simultaneously transforming herself physically. In the words of Susanne Becker: Joan . . . reduces her optical effect as a nineteenth-century-style beauty into that of a ‘secretary on vacation’ – for once ignoring the powers of the male gaze that had so influenced her before . . .19 This is one more transformation in the life of Joan Foster (née Delacourt) who has metamorphosed from obese child to waif-like ingénue to

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pre-Raphaelite beauty via the authorial personae of Louisa K. Delacourt (a name appropriated from her deceased aunt) and the quasi-occult creator of the Lady Oracle poems. Joan also spends her time in hiding, writing another of her mass-market Gothic romances, an activity which, from before her marriage to the high-minded political radical Arthur, has furnished her with a regular income. In a life of secrets, this is one of the secrets she has kept from Arthur, along with the ‘shameful’ truth about her former body shape. The current oeuvre has the working title of Stalked by Love and portions of its text are interleaved with Joan’s narrative. Parodically represented in Lady Oracle, the popular Gothic forms part of a much larger and complex parodic structure. Atwood’s own comments have indicated an acute awareness of the significance of such narratives in women’s lives. Feminist criticism of popular romance in the early 1970s had tended to see it as perpetuating the false consciousness of women endemic to patriarchy and only later theorization in the work of critics such as Radway and Modleski suggested a more complex and potentially positive role.20 In a 1978 interview, Atwood commented: I’m interested in the Gothic novel because it’s very much a woman’s form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, ‘Your husband is trying to kill you?’ People aren’t interested in pop culture books out of pure random selection. They connect with something real in people’s lives.21 More explicitly, in a later interview, she gave her views of the positive role of Gothic and its heroines: I would say that the Jane Eyre pattern is more or less how the gothic has evolved, the Female Gothic – and some people who have written about it have mentioned the masochism, you know, the heroine gets put through all these terrible things, and then there’s the sell-out in the end because she marries the man. But I don’t think it’s that at all. I think it’s lion-taming.22 The relationship between Joan’s writing and her life with its plural identities is at the core of the novel and the heart of the maze that is its central metaphor. Linda Hutcheon, writing in The Canadian Postmodern, suggests that ‘the plot of Lady Oracle both mirrors and contains that which it consistently parodies: the forms of popular art’.23 Stalked by Love has its Gothic heroine but so does Lady Oracle: Joan constructs herself as just that. According to Atwood:

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She’s not particularly a victim. Although she’s a survivor, I wouldn’t say that’s what categorizes her. Certainly many of her complicated problems are caused, not by her victimhood or her survivorhood, but by her romanticism. She is someone who is attempting to act out a romantic myth we’re all handed as women in a non-romantic world.24 Referring to the growing corpus of criticism on her novel, Atwood commented in 1981: There have been some quite good pieces on Lady Oracle . . . – about heroine-ism versus feminism, and about the fact that the main character is a traditional heroine rather than a feminist. That’s quite accurate.25 Yet Atwood’s ‘traditional heroine’ functions as the key element in a multi-layered parody which, while focused on the ironic reversal of the romance convention by which the plain girl or Cinderella is transformed into the beautiful princess or object of desire, does not confine itself to mocking the conventions of popular Gothic. The maze in which Charlotte, the heroine of Stalked by Love, is confronted by her suitor’s former wives is, metaphorically, the maze which constitutes Joan’s life stories and her multiple identities. In the act of writing, she penetrates to the ‘central plot’ (LO, p. 341) of her heroine’s maze and her commercial narrative becomes a mode of confrontation with these multiple selves. Of these four women: Two of them looked a lot like her, with red hair and green eyes and small white teeth. The third was middle-aged, dressed in a strange garment that ended halfway up her calves, with a ratty piece of fur around her neck. The last was enormously fat. She was wearing a pair of pink tights and a short skirt covered with spangles. From her head sprouted two antennae, like a butterfly’s, and a pair of obviously false wings was pinned to her back. (LO, p. 341) According to Eleonora Reo: In Atwood’s treatment it is Joan Foster’s own writing that allows her to explore a plural subjectivity and it is her writing that will enable her to live through this division, this split. In Stalked by Love the maze in the castle acquires an alternative significance: the descent in the maze is also a ‘descent into the underworld’, which suggests the

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labyrinth of the psyche. The scene provides a confrontation in which subjectivity alters and is altered by aspects of itself confronted for the first time.26 In another layer of parodic representation, the maze acts as a metaphor for Atwood’s text. Refusing linearity and closure, the maze that is Atwood’s parodic text offers the possibility of reading in such a way as to challenge what Susanne Becker calls the ‘fantasy reconciliation’ with existing power relations offered by popular Gothic while reminding us of the truths embodied in such novels.27 A novel of its time, Lady Oracle reminds us powerfully that the personal is also political. Published in the same year as Ellen Moers’s Literary Women, it succeeds in moving through imaginative writing far beyond the relatively simplistic recuperation of strong heroines in Moers’s critical project. As the quantity of illuminating critical quotation we have used in relation to Lady Oracle might indicate, this is a text which has proved of considerable interest to feminist literary critics. There is a substantial body of work now from various critical perspectives, including the view that Joan Foster’s problem is her failure to find her ‘real’ self28 and a determination to subject her to thoroughgoing psychoanalysis without too much regard for checking the accuracy of textual references.29 Sophisticated work such as that of Coral Ann Howells, Eleonora Reo and Susanne Becker has been astute in picking up the central role of parody in Atwood’s postmodern, self-referential text. It would seem that if Gothic novels are significant to women readers, Atwood’s engagement with them has had significant appeal for the women critics of the 1980s and 1990s. Atwood called Lady Oracle an ‘anti-gothic romance’ which had ‘the components and pulls them inside out, as you would a glove’. ‘This is where you occasionally miss education in your readers’, she went on to say. ‘I don’t know what people who haven’t read Wuthering Heights make of Lady Oracle’.30 It would seem that the feminist critic has become the ideal reader of parody, a reader whose literary competence is alert to the dense web of intertextuality at work. Now more prominent than ever before in academic literary studies the female critic, as feminist critic, is well positioned both to analyse the role of the popular Gothic romance in the lives of its readers and to recognize the value of comic parodic engagements with those romances and their readership from the Romantic era to the late twentieth century and beyond. We would suggest, therefore, that in the hands of feminists the literature of Gothic parody is a literature of irony and a literature of liberation. Lady Oracle requires that we read ‘beyond the ending’, to paraphrase Rachel Blau

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DuPlessis’s words,31 in order to release Joan Foster and possibly ourselves from the labyrinth. It would appear also that what Sybil Korff Vincent calls the sub-genre of comic/Gothic is not the invention of Atwood but that only with the development of theorized work on female subjectivity by the 1980s was the critic able to recognize it at work and admire its power and sophistication. Just three years after Lady Oracle, Angela Carter’s collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber, was published. These are all parodic rewritings of traditional tales. They are, as Lucie Armitt points out, ‘actually Gothic tales that prey upon the restrictive enclosures of fairy-story formulae’.32 There is no shortage of powerful and assertive women in these tales. In the title story, ‘Bluebeard’ is rewritten so that the young bride is saved from being one more in her husband’s murderous collection of dead wives. This saviour is not a potent male figure but a protective and potent mother who uses the instruments of male violence as a means of defence: On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment’s hesitation she raised my father’s gun, took aim and put a single irreproachable bullet in my husband’s head.33 Thus does the young girl escape from what Aidan Day calls ‘the obliterating egoism of the Marquis’,34 a comment that reminds us that what we see in Meredith’s The Egoist is a failed Bluebeard. Armitt identifies the crux of the debate over sexuality in this collection of stories: ‘are the women active or passive, erotic or inert?’ She suggests that the ‘chamber’ of the collection’s title is ambiguous, denoting not only a room but also a vessel in which case ‘it is not the chamber that contains and thus constrains the woman (who then becomes a terrified victim), but the woman herself who takes control as the body of excess’.35 In ‘The Company of Wolves’ we see a young girl using her sexuality (‘she has just started her woman’s bleeding’ [BC, p. 113]) to ensure her survival in a rewriting of the Grimm story, ‘Little Redcape’. When the handsome young hunter turns out to be the wolf in disguise, she does not flee in horror. Rather, she plays to his desires. She follows her script so far but at the point when he says, ‘All the better to eat you with’, she bursts out laughing: ‘she knew she was nobody’s meat’ (BC, p. 118). Instead, she seduces the wolf; she throws his clothes into the fire with her own and they burn while ‘the old bones under the bed set up a terrible clattering but she did not pay them any heed’ (BC, p. 118).

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The bones, of course, are granny’s but she has her future to think of. Her ‘immaculate flesh’ has appeased the beast; it is not the consummation of death that awaits her (it is life and the maiden rather than death and the maiden) but life in which the boundaries between the bestial and the human are clearly eroded in this parodic comedic ending. In ‘The Lady of the House of Love’, Armitt claims, ‘the unsuspecting interloper enters another version of Carter’s bloody chamber of female sexual depravity’.36 This story, however, through its overt parody of Gothic with its richly polished, excessive descriptions of decay, and – not least – its comic turn, concerns itself with the signifying power of Gothic itself. In Carter’s revisionist writing of the story of the end of the Transylvanian vampire, the Nosferatu (undead), the centuries-old daughter of Vlad the Impaler sits in her crumbling castle, dreams of being human and is reluctantly compelled to lure young men in for supper – hers. The eponymous ‘Lady of the House of Love’ lives in a state of ‘perennial sadness’ in which she is ‘both death and the maiden’ (BC, p. 93). The setting is the domestic, made monstrous by the predatory nature of this version of the sleeping beauty. Carter’s story sets the dark supernatural of Gothic against the innocent rationalism of a young blond English officer who arrives on a bicycle. When Carter reworked this story as a radio play entitled Vampirella in 1978, she commented, ‘In radio it is possible to sustain a knife-edge tension between black comedy and bizarre pathos.’37 This is not a comedy but there are indeed comic effects within it which derive from the incongruity of the young Englishman’s perspective and language as he enters the lair of the ‘tenebrous belle’ (BC, p. 94): ‘But, in for a penny, in for a pound’, he thinks as he steps over the threshold of Nosferatu’s castle, ‘in the invisible, even unacknowledged pentacle of his virginity’ (BC, p. 99). He knows there is something strange, even grotesque, about the young lady who is the châtelaine of all this decay (BC, p. 101) but thinks that she might be an automaton: For she seemed inadequately powered by some slow energy of which she was not in control; as if she had been wound up years ago, when she was born, and now the mechanism was inexorable running down and would leave her lifeless. This idea that she might be an automaton, made of white velvet and black fur, that could not move of its own accord, never quite deserted him; indeed, it deeply moved his heart. The carnival air of her white dress emphasized her unreality, like a sad Columbine who lost her way in the wood a long time ago and never reached the fair. (BC, p. 102)

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There is nothing comic about this automaton, however; insofar as this approaches the comic turn, it is a wry comment on the power of Gothic narratives to give expression to the horrors that characterize the twentieth century. Contrary to the preordained plot of the vampire, the lady does not, in spite of her intentions, drink his blood; he follows her into her chamber (‘What a macabre bedroom! [BC, p. 105]) and there something breaks her ritual, her dark glasses shatter and she cuts her hand. ‘Into this vile and murderous room, the handsome bicyclist brings the innocent remedies of the nursery . . . he will kiss it better for her’ (BC, p. 106). So he, in effect, drinks her blood and, after he has put her to bed, she dies in the course of the night as a result of ‘the pain of becoming human’ (BC, p. 106). He does not at first realize this and is woken by larksong to a chamber illuminated by daylight so that he ‘could see how tawdry it all was, how thin and cheap the satin, the catafalque not ebony at all but black-painted paper stretched on struts of wood, as in the theatre’ (BC, p. 106). The narrative thus bares the device of Gothic fakery by subjecting the ‘Lady’s’ theatrical effects to the light of day. Again the young man’s innocence makes for comic effect as he lays his plans to rehabilitate the Lady: We shall take her to Zurich, to a clinic; she will be treated for nervous hysteria. Then to an eye specialist for her photophobia, and to a dentist to put her teeth into better shape. Any competent manicurist will deal with her claws. (BC, p. 107) But, as we have said, this is not a comic story; it is a tragic one. The Lady may be dead but the ‘dark, fanged rose’ she leaves as a souvenir, ‘plucked from between [her] thighs’ is taken by the young man, who finds he has been recalled to his regiment. Although withered, it revives in water so that ‘the heavy fragrance of Count Nosferatu’s roses drifted down the stone corridor of the barracks’ (BC, p. 107). The young officer is, as we have been told earlier, ‘of that generation for whom history has prepared a special, exemplary fate in the trenches of France’ (BC, p. 97). It is, it seems, 1914: ‘The next day his regiment embarked for France’ (BC, p. 108). There is a deep irony here, perhaps even a sad and bitter satire. The rationalism of the modern world is set against the ancient barbarity of the Nosferatu legend; the comic turn is temporary. The trappings of the lady’s chamber may be exposed as fake but the roses, fertilized by the bones of so many victims, still bloom so that the ancient barbarity becomes a modern one. The young man, we are told, had been protected by his lack of imagination in the Gothic castle but he ‘will learn to

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shudder in the trenches’ (BC, p. 104). Thus Carter rewrites the traditional Gothic plot, allows her hero to walk free from the castle of the undead but demonstrates the potency of the evil that it represents as it surfaces in new and monstrous forms in the twentieth century. In reading ‘The Lady of the House of Love’, we are reminded of Robert Phiddian’s words: ‘Parodic erasure disfigures its pre-texts in various ways that seek to guide our re-evaluation or refiguration of them.’38 As we noted earlier, for Hutcheon, parody operates ‘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’.39 The selection of texts in this chapter has demonstrated the comic turn at work in different ways in Gothic writing by women in the 1970s and 1980s. In all of them, the comic turn points to the emancipatory possibilities of Gothic.

6 Men Writing Men

Such was the impact of second wave feminism that the 1980s saw the invention of the term ‘crisis in masculinity’. However, as Michael Roper and John Tosh have pointed out, the phenomenon is not new: ‘Masculinity is always bound up with negotiations about power, and is often therefore experienced as tenuous’.1 One of the effects of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s was to focus the spotlight on gendered social practices and on sexuality. Thus by the 1980s there was a growing popular understanding that gender was not synonymous with the biological body, that gender and sex are not synonymous. This is nicely illustrated in a comic vein by the popular satirical television series, Spitting Image, which portrayed the then prime minister, Mrs Thatcher (otherwise known as ‘The Iron Lady’ and ‘Attila the Hen’, to quote two of her more repeatable nicknames), dressed in a man’s suit. Topped with the three-dimensional caricature that was the latex head of the Spitting Image puppet, this representation of Mrs Thatcher became equally as familiar to the British in the 1980s as the dulcet tones and gentle visage of ‘the lady’ herself.2 Along with similar puppets, ‘she’ was manipulated to participate in scenes of public and private life in which her weaknesses and strengths alike were ruthlessly satirized. In addition to adopting male dress, ‘Mrs Thatcher’ was shown behaving in a far more masculine manner than her male Cabinet colleagues. This conceit was carried to the extent of sending her to the men’s toilets where she did what a man has got to do, and how a man would do it (usually while delivering a dose of short shrift to some hapless male underling). Doubly uncanny, this puppet appeared to be no passive automaton in the tradition of Hoffmann’s Olympia but an aggressive grotesque parody that at times seemed to take on a life of its own. 136

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In this way, Spitting Image was reflecting not only the ‘crisis in masculinity’ but a growing understanding of the times: that masculinity and femininity did not necessarily map neatly onto the biological male and female. The popular culture of the 1980s demonstrates a fascination with this gender instability, from Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Tootsie to the popularity of ‘Boy George’ and Divine’s bravura performance as a woman in Hairspray. The performance of gender that was to be so clearly articulated in theoretical work by scholars such as Judith Butler had become the stuff of a gleeful and often comic playfulness in which parodic re-representations became of central importance. Butler herself, in the conclusion to her 1990 book Gender Trouble, comments: there is a subversive laughter in the pastiche-effect of parodic practices in which the original, the authentic, and the real are themselves constituted as effects . . . The parodic repetition of gender exposes as well the illusion of gender identity as an intractable depth and inner substance. As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender is an ‘act’, as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, self-criticism and those hyperbolic exhibitions of ‘the natural’ that in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status.3 The 1980s was a particularly interesting decade as far as gender identity and traditional roles in the UK were concerned. At one extreme there was, in 1982, the re-assertion of imperial values and a masculine warrior culture in the Falklands War, promoted so energetically by Mrs Thatcher; there was also, in 1988, the introduction of Section 28 of the Local Government Act that resulted in an anxiety concerning the discussion of same sex desire in schools. This suggests a decade particularly nervous about the cultural erosion of heterosexual identity. ‘Masculinity’ became, in the wake of second wave feminism, a matter for academic debate. There was a recognition that it is neither a unitary category nor a given. Writing in 1989, Arthur Brittan, for example, commented that: ‘Those who speak of masculinity as an essence, as an inborn characteristic, are confusing masculinity with masculinism, the masculine ideology.’4 Brittan also suggests that ‘masculinity . . . will always be an expression of the current image that men have of themselves in relation to women’.5 As divorce figures rose, and women became economically more independent, this image became more unstable, while the body/gender link became a focus of both popular interest and academic investigation.

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We have seen that a number of innovative feminist writers turned to non-realist forms as a mode of envisioning the possibilities of women’s lives. Similarly, some male novelists also turned to traditions of nonrealist and in some cases Gothic writing to explore the phenomenon of ‘the crisis of masculinity’. As Cyndy Hendershot has pointed out, ‘Masculinity as masquerade may be articulated through Gothic texts, which frequently reveal the fragility of traditional manhood.’6 In this chapter we shall look at two writers who produced tours de force of comic Gothic: the versatile Iain Banks and Patrick McGrath who has been described by one reviewer as ‘possibly the best Gothic novelist ever’.7 Banks’s The Wasp Factory (1984) and McGrath’s The Grotesque (1989) indeed articulate masculinity as masquerade and do so in ways that are appalling and comic at the same time. Iain Banks made his literary debut with The Wasp Factory, a novel that soon earned him the title of ‘The Scottish Bard of Depravity’. Alan MacGillivray comments, ‘With The Wasp Factory, Banks clobbered the reading public with a pyrotechnic display of humorous sadism and over the top bad taste.’8 Later editions of the book carried a medley of critical reviews as a preface; many of these point to its loathsomeness, The Sunday Express (not, it should be said, a reliable arbiter of critical taste in Britain) going as far as to describe it as ‘a silly, gloatingly sadistic and grisly yarn of a family of Scots lunatics’. Many, however, recognized that it was the work of a major new talent, The Financial Times pronouncing it to be ‘a Gothic horror story of quite exceptional quality’.9 It is, indeed, a nasty book but one in which Meredith’s ‘comic imps’ are clearly at work for satiric purposes. It sits firmly, we suggest, in the category of Comic Gothic. Although it is recognizably set in the Moray Forth area of Scotland, it nonetheless has about its setting a surrealistic quality. The quasi-island, reached by causeway, is reminiscent of the remote Scottish island where Victor Frankenstein carried out his aborted attempt to create a bride for his monster. The novel’s setting also evokes in a grimly comic way the barbarisms that take place on other fictional islands, such as those of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau – itself reviewed as ‘a mere shocker’ when it first appeared in 189610 – and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. On it lives Francis Leslie Cauldhame in a large crumbling family home with his reclusive and eccentric father. As a portrait of a troubled adolescence, the novel resembles, for some commentators, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, with its absent older brother and its theme of madness in a dysfunctional family.11 The seventeen-year-old Francis (or Frank as he is more usually known), like Holden Caulfield, narrates his own story and does

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so in such a way that his weird and sadistic behaviour is presented as if entirely rational and acceptable. This incongruity creates much of the comic effect. He is apparently the sane brother; his committed psychotic brother Eric has escaped from the mental hospital where he had been incarcerated. As Eric approaches the island, he leaves in his wake a trail of incinerated dogs and terrorized children. He announces his progress home to Frank through a series of phone calls: ‘when I get near a town I look for a good fat juicy dog and I make friends with it and take it out to the woods and then I kill and eat it. What could be simpler? I do love the outdoor life.’ ‘You are cooking them, aren’t you?’ ‘Of course I’m fucking cooking them,’ Eric said indignantly. ‘What do you think I am?’12 For a native of Britain – a country particularly sentimental about dogs as pets – the comic incongruity here lies in the idea that cooking a quasisacred domestic animal somehow sanitizes the act of eating it. At a deeper level, of course, it also comically inflects Kristeva’s concept of the abject. The structural binaries of the edible/inedible, which cultures use to define what it means to be properly ‘civilized’, are dissolved in this episode. Thus Frank sees Eric as mad: ‘Eric was crazy all right, even if he was my brother’, he says, adding, ‘He was lucky to have someone sane around who still liked him’ (WF, p. 103), a comment ironically undercut, however, by its juxtaposition with a reference to ‘the Factory’ in the preceding paragraph. The wasp factory, ‘made of metal and . . . nearly a metre in diameter’ (WF, p. 120), is an ornate contraption built inside an old clock face that used to hang over the Royal Bank of Scotland in the nearby town. Frank has hauled it up into the loft where it operates as an elaborate torture chamber and arbitrary dispenser of death to Frank’s captured wasps. The machinations of the wasp factory and the destinies of its inhabitants are seen by Frank as having oracular significance. The desire for control and power completely dominates him and is expressed through a need to predict the future and in a propensity for sadism. In addition to the Factory, Frank’s activities include the murder of small animals for ritualistic purposes (the novel begins with his going off to check his ‘sacrifice poles’) and, it emerges in the course of his narrative, the murder of two of his cousins and his younger brother: ‘That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and I don’t intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through’

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(WF, p. 42). The narration of these murders is dispassionate but the bizarre cunning they display gives rise to grotesquely comic effects. The bullying cousin has a poisonous snake slipped into his artificial leg while he sleeps, the innocent younger brother is encouraged to blow himself up with a Second World War bomb and the girl cousin is swept out over the sea entangled in a giant kite. Frank’s description of his manipulation of the aftermath of these murders and his deflection of suspicion from himself is outrageously callous. Despite this cavalier callousness, however, Frank is aware of the fragmentation of his psyche: ‘Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn’t really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of people inside my brain’ (WF, p. 62). The rational part of himself observes the bizarre rituals he undertakes (often with his own bodily substances) and sees them as nonsense. The other more dominant part believes in the power of such exercises. His two greatest enemies, he says, are Women and the Sea: These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them, and the Sea because it has always frustrated me, destroying what I have built, washing away what I have left, wiping clean the marks I have made. And I’m not all that sure the Wind is blameless, either. (WF, p. 43) Here Frank expresses the quintessential insecurities of masculinity as it negotiates power: he defines himself against women, whom he despises, and he loathes those elements that are beyond his control and more powerful than he is. Berthold Schoene-Harwood has explored persuasively the question of masculinity in The Wasp Factory, in which, he argues, ‘patriarchal masculinity, traditionally the bedrock of all communal and individual identification, undergoes an elaborate process of ironic unwrapping’.13 According to this critic, Frank is only able to think of his own madness as sanity because, unlike Eric’s, it appears to have patriarchal sanction. Indeed, the quasi-island on which Frank lives is, in many ways, a microcosm of patriarchal society: jets bound for oil-rigs worked solely by men fly over it; women have only peripheral roles – Mrs Clamp who ‘does’ comes in once a week and Frank’s mother is remembered only as having paid a flying visit, having left her husband many years before; the television at home is constantly tuned to replays of American westerns and crime series which foreground men as rough heroes. Schoene-Harwood comments on how earlier readings of the novel had failed to read its parodic multi-layeredness in terms of gender

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subversion, being far more eager to integrate the novel into the Scottish literary tradition, and comparing it with Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Alastair Gray’s Lanark. Our reading acknowledges this Gothic heritage but sees its comic exploitation as being particularly appropriate to its project of gender subversion. Frank is monstrous in his amorality, yet he operates as a recognizable parody of masculinity. He over-compensates for his assumed identity as a castrated male. The story of his castration by ‘Old Saul’, the family dog, has been told to him by his father and seems confirmed by a childhood memory of being attacked by the dog: Old Saul had gone down in our history and my personal mythology as the Castraitor, but thanks to the little creatures that flew the creek I had him in my power now. (WF, p. 103)14 This is a false story told him by a manipulating Frankenstein of a father. It is as reliable as some of his other information: that ‘Pathos was one of the Three Musketeers, Fellatio was a character in Hamlet, Vitreous a town in China, and that Irish peasants had to tread the peat to make Guinness’ (WF, p. 14). His father, a scientist (Frank is not sure if he is a doctor of chemistry or biochemistry), has withdrawn from the world in order to carry out his own private experiment which takes the form of a protracted and cruel practical joke. An ex-hippy and vegetarian who has ‘a delicate face, like a woman’s’ (WF, p. 10), his father nevertheless feeds his ‘son’ beef in order to build him up (‘real men don’t eat quiche’ was a popular slogan in England during the 1980s). He is thus a comic version of Wells’ Dr Moreau who is described by Bernard Bergonzi as ‘a perverted Prospero’.15 We learn that he had tried to change Eric’s gender by dressing him up as a girl but concerned relatives had intervened. His manipulation of Frank is particularly grotesque: in fact, Frank never was castrated by Old Saul. This is the secret of the Gothic edifice that is the Cauldhame family house. Those are not his preserved immature genitals in a jar but a confection of pink plasticine; he does not have a penis because he is female.16 What Frank sees in the jar are not the severed parts of his anatomy but something fake, rendered comically grotesque by the detail about plasticine, a child’s play material. All the strong beef curries served up to him by his vegetarian father merely masked the administering of male hormones. Only at the very end of the novel does Frank reflect with remorse on his past actions and appear to accept his present state. ‘Eric came home to see his brother, only to find (Zap! Pow! Dams burst! Bombs go off! Wasps

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fry: ttsss!) he’s got a sister’ (WF, p. 184). The novel’s intertextual engagement with previous Gothic texts does, of course, raise serious ethical questions about the use of scientific knowledge to manipulate the human body just as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein did in 1818. Frank’s father’s pact with modern science is just as Faustian as Victor Frankenstein’s. But, rather than heightening anxiety, the novel’s element of dark comedy encourages a detached and ironic perspective on these matters. Thus, the most horrific episode in the novel – which describes Eric’s traumatic experience as a medical student when he saw maggots eating into the tissue under the skull-cap of a brain-damaged child – functions in several ways. In terms of the plot, it explains why the sensitive Eric went ‘mad’; it also positions Banks’s novel firmly within the tradition of classic masculine body horror Gothic, its abject images of decomposition echoing many texts from Lewis’s The Monk onwards.17 However, it also acts as the touchstone by which we judge the madness and sanity not just of Frank’s world, but of Britain itself in the 1980s. Eric, a hypersensitive, imaginative and brilliant child who used to ‘cry like a girl’ when he was upset, enters the caring profession of medicine but is arguably driven mad by a callous society that no longer cares properly for the sick, the weak and the damaged. ‘There is’, as Margaret Thatcher was famously to say in 1987, ‘no such thing as society’.18 Madness, then, is relative, and in Banks’s shocking but comic novel is portrayed as a possible reaction to such social horrors. Indeed, discussing Eric’s craziness whilst playing an electronic space-battle game, Jamie (Frank’s friend) describes the social hierarchy itself as mad: ‘The madder people. A lot of them seem to be leaders of countries or religions or armies. The real loonies’ (WF, p. 112). This dissolution of the binary between the sane and the insane is complemented by the dissolution of the binary between masculine and feminine in the novel. Until the very last few pages, we see Frank performing a masculinity that is repulsive in its crude embrace of macho values – something that he finally acknowledges: ‘I believe that I decided if I could never become a man, I – the unmanned – would out-man those around me, and so I became the killer, a small image of the ruthless soldier-hero almost all I’ve ever seen or read pay strict homage to’ (WF, p. 183; our italics). The moment when, having found tampons and hormone pills and suspecting that his father may be female, he pulls down his underpants in order to find out the truth, is crucial in challenging the power of the phallus. For what he sees are the biological markers of maleness and these are described in terms which render them merely rather repulsive: ‘I stood staring at my father’s dark-haired, large, rather greasy-looking cock and

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balls.’ The potential trauma of the moment is then deflected by a greater monstrosity: the sentence finishes with the words, ‘and something animal, out there on the island, screamed’ (WF, p. 174). Eric is out there and he has set a whole flock of sheep on fire. Frank’s realization that he is, biologically speaking, female not surprisingly results in his sense of identity being severely shaken: ‘I want to laugh or cry or both, as I sit here, thinking about my one life, my three deaths. Four deaths now, in a way, now that my father’s truth has murdered what I was. But I am still me; I am the same person, with the same memories and the same deeds done, the same (small) achievements, the same (appalling) crimes to my name’ (WF, p. 182). But is he? The image of the brain-damaged child’s skull seething with maggots acts as a symbol of possible psychosis as well as of an uncaring society. Frank seems to have adjusted to his new gender, but he has been programmed psychologically as masculine: will this product of a deeply misogynist culture be able to adjust to womanhood as self, or does that way madness lie? Or should we read this ending more positively, assuming that, like Teiresias, Frances – as Frank has now become – will attain a wisdom and identity beyond the usual crippling parameters of what society accepts as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’? This is how Berthold Schoene-Harwood sees the novel’s closure – as one intimating ‘a period of regenerative change’, both in terms of gender identity and for Scotland itself.19 And, indeed, Frances’s final thoughts do seem to offer a wry hope that the self need not be straitjacketed for life by the social constructs of a particular historical moment: Inside this greater machine, things are not quite so cut and dried (or cut and pickled) as they have appeared in my experience. Each of us, in our own personal Factory, may believe we have stumbled down one corridor, and that our fate is sealed and certain (dream or nightmare, humdrum or bizarre, good or bad), but a word, a glance, a slip – anything can change that, alter it entirely, and our marble hall becomes a gutter, or our rat-maze a golden path. Our destination is the same in the end, but our journey – part chosen, part determined – is different for us all, and changes even as we live and grow. I thought one door had snicked shut behind me years ago; in fact I was still crawling about the face. Now the door closes, and my journey begins. (WF, pp. 183–184) Banks’s novel, in its interrogation of gender identity, re-enacts the same tension between conflicting discourses about the body and sexual

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identity that is so much in evidence in novels at the end of the nineteenth century – for example, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and, as we have seen, George du Maurier’s Trilby. In all these texts, issues of same sex and unregulated desire are explored but finally relegated to beyond the pale: Hyde is eliminated; Dracula is vanquished in the Carpathian wilds; even Little Billee sacrifices his love for the androgynous Trilby to middle-class respectability whilst Trilby herself is killed off. Thus the status quo is restored. However, Banks does not reinstate the status quo, any more than Weldon does, for example, in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. Although they both raise questions about the coherence and stability of identity in the face of body and/or gender change, they both see the promise of liberation from traditional gender constraints in such metamorphoses. There are, though, echoes of Thatcher’s values in the behaviour of the two protagonists: both become ruthless, Frank even describing himself as such. Their desire for power at any cost and their monstrous egoism echo not only the Faustian pact we see in Frankenstein but also the rampant individualism promoted and embodied by Thatcher during the 1980s. And here we can perceive another fundamental difference from those late nineteenth-century Gothic texts. For in Banks’s novel, as in Weldon’s, monstrosity is no longer confined to the figure of vampire or the mad scientist: it has become banal; it is part of society, part of the system, part of the ‘greater machine’ to use Frank’s – or Frances’s – phrase. As Judith Halberstam has noted: modernity has eliminated the comfort of monsters because we have seen, in Nazi Germany and elsewhere, that evil works often as a system, it works through institutions and it works as a banal (meaning ‘common to all’) mechanism. In other words, evil stretches across cultural and political productions as complicity and collaboration and it manifests itself as a seamless norm rather than as some monstrous disruption . . . Monsters within postmodernism are already inside – the house, the body, the head, the skin, the nation – and they work their way out. Accordingly, it is the human, the façade of the normal, that tends to become the place of terror within postmodern Gothic.20 In comic Gothic, however, the façade of the normal is a place of humour as well as horror. Humour invites detachment and a certain objectivity – and this is the locus of subversion as defined by Judith Butler. The Wasp Factory raises interesting questions about British society and western culture. In so skilfully drawing on the hybridity inherent in the Gothic

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tradition, Banks gives us a contemporary Gothic in which the comic turn combines with horror to unsettle our assumptions as readers and as ‘modern’ subjects. In 1991, Patrick McGrath edited an influential collection of short stories with Bradford Morrow entitled The New Gothic, claiming in the introduction that: Though no longer shackled to the conventional props of the genre, the themes that fuel these pieces – horror, madness, monstrosity, death, disease, terror, evil, and weird sexuality – strongly manifest the Gothic sensibility.21 McGrath’s ‘new Gothic’, as seen in his own writing, is typically set in recent history, the mid-twentieth century, indicating a monstrous past that lurks in living memory. His early work, published at the end of the 1980s, while dealing in all of the above, also exhibits an exuberant and gleeful weirdness and its dominant tone is comic. Although not shackled to the conventional props of the genre, it tends to a parodic mode in which the legacy of Gothic, both in its traditional forms and in its more contemporary popular manifestations, is in evidence. According to McGrath: the Gothic genre is a mature genre; it’s a mannered genre, and to work in it with any real freshness or originality is difficult. My first impulse was to play with its very well established conventions; that inevitably became a form of pastiche as I exaggerated motifs, images, ideas that had already been well exaggerated by two centuries of development.22 His collection of short stories, Blood and Water, was published in 1988 and contains several stories that probe sexuality and gender. In the three that we shall consider here, images of bodily mutilation and dismemberment dominate tales told in such a way that they remain comic, albeit perilously so. Two of them subject the profession of psychoanalysis to an overt sceptical ridicule and appear to question its efficacy in relation to mental disorder. In this respect, they differ from his later work which tends to offer a serious and detailed anatomy of insanity. By making psychoanalysis itself the butt of their gruesome jokes, they also tend to pre-empt a psychoanalytic reading. In Blood and Water, for example, it is the psychiatrist who is represented as the grotesque figure and who becomes the subject of a figurative castration

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and a literal decapitation. In ‘The Skewer’, three of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank and Ernest Jones) appear as visions in the form of miniature figures who frisk about and scuttle around as they bait the troubled person who sees them. Blood and Water is a story about plumbing. In it there is one unreliable boiler, the use of a large plumber’s tool to murderous effect, three baths and a fair amount of water down the plughole. It is also a story of madness in the aristocracy during the inter-war years, an ill-fated intervention by a grotesquely fat doctor and a romantic vision of transcendence. This heady mix makes for a tale that is at the same time weird, gruesome and comic, a tale told by a dispassionate narrative voice that reconstructs the crime that lies at its centre. The narrator, who tells the story mainly in the present tense, invites the reader to view a series of scenes: phrases like ‘now turn your eyes’ and ‘our first clear glimpse’ are used in setting the scene.23 In this way, the importance of the visual is woven into the very telling of the story. The setting of the story is evoked initially through self-consciously clichéd images: Phlange, the country house where the events take place, is perhaps drawn in this way to indicate its typicality, as with Patterne Hall in The Egoist. The opening paragraph invites us to ‘imagine finally’ an idyllic picnic scene on the lawns and concludes with the sentence: ‘It is August 1936, a cloudless Friday afternoon, and England is at peace’ (BW, p. 172). This situates the story very precisely at a historical moment and in so doing places the action that is to follow in a broader context. This is the world of Tony Last’s Hetton and, as the narrator comments, ‘the landed gentry is hardly prospering at this precise point in history’ (BW, p. 174). Phlange’s master is ‘Sir Norman Percy’, ‘a short, stocky, bad-tempered Roman Catholic gentleman with a thatch of yellow hair and bristling black eyebrows that meet on the bridge of his nose’ (BW, p. 174). Sir Norman’s blood-line predisposes him towards insanity: ‘there is some history of madness in the family, and in his lucid moments he realizes he should probably see someone’ (BW, p. 175); the malfunctioning of Phlange’s ancient boiler precipitates a ‘crack-up’, manifested by the appearance of a throbbing vein in his temple (‘a phenomenon known to psychiatrists and bartenders alike as “the snake”’ [BW, p. 175]). In Sir Norman Percy the nexus of class and gender privilege that constitute his masculinity is already under threat: Phlange, ‘a stately Georgian pile’, is feeling the strain of its ancient plumbing and its blown boiler in precipitating a bout of insanity in its master, brings about a catastrophic event. Sir Norman decapitates the self-satisfied

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‘eminent Harley Street specialist’, Dr Cadwallader, who has come to examine Lady Percy. Cadwallader and Lady Percy are presented as two contrasting and counterpointed figures. Lady Percy is an ethereal pre-Raphaelite figure: ‘a pale woman in a white silk gown, utterly motionless and devoid of expression . . . gazing out over the copse of chestnuts on the brow of the distant hills, and into the deep sky beyond’ (BW, p. 172); her chamber boasts a ‘four-poster bed, spread with a fine-woven coverlet of medieval design’ (BW, p. 181). In contrast, Cadwallader is as bulbous as his name. In the third paragraph of the story there is an extended description of him in his bathtub. A grossly fat man, he is described in terms normally associated with the monstrous feminine: his breasts compose themselves on the first swells of his gut like deflated cushions, wide, soft-nippled tyres of flesh which but for the baldness of the man and the little pink hose-end of a penis peeping out from below would certainly identify the body as female. (BW, p. 173) The reference to ‘hose-end’ of the penis is characteristic of Blood and Water’s joky use of the plumbing metaphor throughout. Phlange’s ancient plumbing may be an essential element in the plot but plumbing as a metaphor in the story is related to human genitalia, which are sometimes referred to by doctors (in an attempt to be down-to-earth) as ‘plumbing’ – hence the ‘hose-end’. Indeed, the name of Sir Norman’s estate handyman, ‘Tinkler’, indicates that this is a sustained joke. There is a comic incongruity in the description of the ‘life-size statue of Minerva’ in Cadwallader’s bathroom as ‘goddess’ of plumbing that is intensified by the reference to ‘one outstretched arm snapped off at the elbow and Cadwallader’s puce bathrobe draped over the stump’ (BW, p. 173). Yet comic though it is, this is also a visual metaphor for Cadwallader’s assumption, culturally endorsed, that the female is both castrated and used. The contrast between Cadwallader and Lady Percy is highlighted by the different effects of their bodies on their bathwater. In Cadwallader’s bath, in a comic rendition of the abject, ‘we find a scurfy vortex which makes horrible sucking sounds as it devolves and carries in its sluggish but implacable spiral a few hairs, a few crumbs of flaking plaster, and a number of small English insects’. Lady Percy’s bathwater, on the other hand, ‘spins down the drain behind her with a swift, clear and noiseless motion’ (BW, p. 175). If the doctor is all too corporeal, Lady Percy appears to be the opposite. However, in addition to being suicidally

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depressed, she is manifesting what Cadwallader calls ‘a rather unusual case of clitoral tumefaction’ (BW, p. 178). Her body, however, rather than being represented as grotesque is described as an ethereal figure from romance whereas both Cadwallader and Percy in their own ways are rendered monstrous. The central irony of the story is that Lady Percy, who appears to have developed ‘this curious deformity’ and is revealed to the reader at the end of the story as possessing ‘a small, soft penis, plump and pinkly wrinkled, lying upon a delicate be-testicled sac which hangs against her closed thighs like a raindrop’ (BW, p. 181), is not the one of this trio who is represented as grotesque. The intrusive tendency to promote normalization is satirized here. It is Cadwallader’s proposal that the case should be written up in the Lancet as ‘a scientific monograph’ (BW, p. 177); Sir Norman’s fear that she will be subjected ‘to the knife’ (BW, p. 178) appears to act as the trigger for his act of monstrous violence in which Cadwallader himself becomes the subject of mutilation. The hermaphrodite (Lady Percy is described as ‘the pale dead hermaphrodite’ as her husband lifts her from the bath where she has committed suicide [BW, p. 182]) is through the discourse of romance represented as an almost mythical being, distressed and depressed only because of the unacceptability of her dual-sexed body in a conventional world. Framed within the overarching plumbing metaphor, a triangular relationship is enacted in which Sir Norman assumes the identity of an Arthurian knight. ‘The flaxen-haired knight’, as he now becomes in contrast with the less flattering earlier description of his appearance, enters the ‘misty realm, this Avalon, this isle of the dead’ that is Cadwallader’s (BW, p. 180). Yet the comic turn is never far away and ‘gripped in his fist is a large spanner, and it glints in the sunlight as he advances unseen on the back of his foe’ (BW, p. 180). Sir Norman despatches ‘his foe’ with a plumber’s tool and uses another to saw off his head. Thus in comic parodic mode, using a crude phallic symbol, Sir Norman asserts his masculinity and mastery of his domain. Ironically he does so in defence of an older mythical sexual identity. Cyndy Hendershot writes of how the modern period saw an ‘epistemological shift from hermetic science to mechanical, Baconian, or modern science’ and how this ‘entailed a shift from a rhetoric that privileged the hermaphrodite as its symbol to a rhetoric that established the autonomous, rigidly masculine scientist as its ideal’.24 In its own grimly comic way, Blood and Water sets a threatened masculinity (in the shape of the aristocrat defending his domain) on to the modern science that reinforces gender difference.

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In doing so, it uses the specular, the emphasis on what can be seen, that underpins psychoanalytic theories of gender identity. Freud’s essay on ‘The Sandman’, as we have seen, concentrated on the fear of blinding as symbolic of the fear of castration and the locus of the uncanny in the story. Sir Norman, in presenting the bloody severed head of Cadwallader to his lady says to her: ‘Show yourself to me’ (BW, p. 181) and the reader is then shown her ‘deformity’. ‘In deep psychotic territory’ (BW, p. 182), Sir Norman does not realize until it is too late that his wife has fled to the bathroom and committed suicide by cutting her wrist in the bath. He is instead ‘fascinated by the eyes of his enemy’ (BW, p. 182). He ‘seats himself before the bloody head set between the mirrors on the dresser and there gazes into its infinite deadness’ (BW, p. 182). Only after coming to his senses (or somewhere near them) does Sir Norman batter his way into his wife’s bathroom with the spanner. We leave the scene as, cradling Lady Percy’s dead body, he ‘raises his head and sees, framed by the rainbow, a vast shimmering figure of light who slowly opens her arms and fills the sky with her radiance; and for a moment he is transfigured, and himself appears vividly aflame within her dazzling splendour’. Meanwhile, ‘as the gloom of twilight steals upon the chamber’ . . . ‘the flies begin to gather on the doctor’s eyes’ (BW, p. 183). Blood and Water offers a gruesome version of the comic turn. The bizarre joke is turned on Cadwallader: it is he of the grotesque, feminized body who nonetheless represents modern interventionist science, who is metaphorically castrated. Sir Norman kills him with a large ‘tool’ and then becomes fixated on his eyes, the psychoanalyst’s symbol for castration. Two kinds of masculinity have been pitted against one another here: the rationalizing of the scientific establishment that cannot recognize its own grotesquerie and the class-bound but regressive (madness in the family) masculinity of Sir Norman who is prompted to defend his family honour by the use of the phallic ‘tool’. The story’s closing epitaph is a verse from Melville which is carved on Sir Norman Percy’s tombstone: What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder The human integral clove asunder And shied the fractions through life’s gate? (BW, p. 183) The significance of this epitaph is open to interpretation. Is the cloven ‘human integral’ a reference to the division between the sexes or is it a reference to the fragmentation of Sir Norman Percy’s psyche? He is committed to Broadmoor where ‘after that first tragic blaze of psychosis

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had burned itself out, he resumed the role he had played so well all his life, that of the bucolic squire, and spent the rest of his mortal span . . . in a state of happy and imperious insanity’ (BW, p. 183).25 Such a role, it is suggested, can only be unproblematical in such circumstances. Psychiatrists tend to come to nasty ends in this early fiction of McGrath’s and it is intimated that that will be the fate of one Dr Max Nordau in a story from the same collection. ‘The Skewer’ deals directly with gender identity and the haunting presence of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis whom it comically and literally cuts down to size. It is the story of Neville (or, as it turns out, his twin sister Evelyn) Pilkington, distinguished art critic, as narrated by his nephew or niece (we are not told which). Neville Pilkington’s particular version of masculinity, aesthetic and reclusive because of disfigurement from an accident, has, we learn at the end of the story, been a masquerade. In this story, we see the characteristic McGrath strategy of giving characters names that are evocative in relation to Gothic fiction. Treating Neville and subsequently giving evidence at his inquest is Dr Max Nordau. Although the historical Max Nordau was not a psychiatrist, his Degeneration (1892; published in England in 1895) was an influential book in its time. Nordau launched an attack on the degeneracy of contemporary art and culture and dismissed mysticism in any form as being the product of hysteria. In the words of Lyn Pykett: He reserves his greatest scorn for the upper classes and also for (decadent) artists whose behaviour and work threatened gender boundaries. Among his main examples are mystics and symbolists for whom ‘the highest development of a morality consists in renouncing sexuality and transforming oneself into a hybrid hermaphrodite’.26 Here we can see the connection between McGrath’s Max Nordau and his historical namesake. Visions are dismissed as pathological, products of the diseased mind; mysticism is a symptom of degeneracy. The narrator tells us that her/his uncle’s mind had taken ‘a mystical, not to say Gothic, turn in the twilight of his life. Like Yeats, he [had come] to believe in fairies’ (BW, p. 108). Just as the psychoanalytic critic delves into the depths of a text to explain its effects, however, so Nordau presents Neville as a case in which the torment suffered by the old ‘man’ is self-inflicted: He had begun, he said, to conduct intensive psychotherapy sessions with my uncle, but it seems Neville’s psyche was well defended, and staunchly resisted the attempted penetrations of Nordau’s insights.

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The Freud hallucination, said Nordau, was a product of that defensiveness. It was one of the most vividly externalized manifestations of psychic resistance in the morbid personality that he’d encountered in his long clinical career. (BW, p. 110) There is nothing comic about the fate of Neville who cuts out his own eye in a Brussels hotel room and then hangs himself in his London home. The comic turn in this grisly tale takes place in his visions. In the framed narration, Neville’s journal forms a significant part of the framed narrative and he writes of his harassment by visions of miniature psychoanalysts. First there is Freud, ‘a tiny man, with a welltrimmed, graying beard and old-fashioned suit of heavy tweed’. Here is the incongruity of the comic: ‘but what was most remarkable was that he was not more than fifteen inches high! . . . “Guten Abend,” said the tiny stranger in a high piping voice. “Ich bin Doktor Sigmund Freud”’ (BW, p. 109). There follow encounters with Otto Rank, who makes his presence felt on the boat train, and Ernest Jones. Descriptions of these encounters as they appear in the journal are interleaved with Nordau’s report in the courtroom. Neville/Evelyn’s journal offers a poetic and violent metaphorical account of the psychoanalytic process in which probing and excavation of the psyche are represented by the images of sharp implements that finally literalize themselves in the form of the pen that the miniature Jones uses as a lance to put out Neville’s eye in an act of symbolic castration. Nordau’s interpretation of this event is in accordance with classic psychoanalytic theory: Neville Pilkington disfigured himself, destroyed a vital organ. Figuratively, and with the only means at his disposal, he hacked down some great standing thing. I leave it to you to name that thing. (BW, p. 119) The response of the narrator, ‘Oh, phallocentric fallacy! My uncle had no great standing thing!’ (BW, p. 119), makes sense only with the final twist of the story and underlines the false premises of psychoanalytic theory upon which Nordau has made his judgement. Neville’s final vision involves ‘the whole Weimar Congress’; he is, he claims, ‘infested with psychoanalysts’: There are psychoanalysts everywhere – perched on my bookshelves, curled up in the drawers of my desk, crawling over the furniture – one is even squatting on my globe. (BW, p. 121)

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‘Buzzing’ and ‘crawling’ everywhere, they manifest themselves, in Neville’s last horrific vision, in the form of vermin. Such is the horror of Neville’s fate that this comic aspect of the story that the frolicsome mannikins provide is very contained – unless of course, the final twist is considered comic. If so, it is not the ending of comedy but a nemesis that delivers a kind of grotesque justice. The key to the reading of this ending is in the narrative voice, that of the niece/nephew. This narrator states her/his view of the events vehemently early in the story: I repudiate Dr Max Nordau’s testimony, with its scurrilous implications regarding my uncle’s mental state. I suggest to you that this was no simple case of hereditary suicidal tendency; rather that Dr Max Nordau is guilty of gross professional misconduct, that he subjected my uncle to sustained verbal harassment, and that the effects of this harassment were so pernicious that my uncle was finally hounded, hectored, and driven to the grave! (BW, pp. 107–108) The narrator’s exclamation after Dr Nordau’s analysis of Neville’s self mutilation (‘Oh phallocentric fallacy!’ [BW, p. 119]) makes sense in the light of her/his revelation at the end of the story: not only is Neville really Evelyn, the twin whom everyone thought had died in the plane crash they had both been involved in, but that fact had been known to her/him for some time. The body she or he cuts down is ‘the body of a slender old woman’ who ‘had assumed her brother’s identity, for only thus could she transcend the most debilitating disfigurement of all, her womanhood, and make something of the suddenly narrowed range of possibilities that life offered her’ (BW, p. 123). By a strange coincidence the narrator too is handling a sharp instrument when she is called by Neville’s housekeeper, distraught at finding him dead. This is the ‘skewer’ of the title, the description of which echoes the vortex that Ernest Jones had evoked for Neville in provoking him to commit suicide by hanging: ‘I allowed the light to glint upon the facets of its sharpened point and catch the ridges of its twisting thread’ (BW, p. 122). It is also a skewer for ‘pinning meat’, so that this particular instrument suggests that the narrator might be carrying out the domestic business of cooking. Perhaps this, combined with the outrage at Nordau’s diagnosis, is an indicator that the narrator is female. If so, she takes her place alongside the vengeful figures of our previous chapter. Evelyn may have been a victim of patriarchal attitudes and of a phallocentric medical establishment but her niece is made of different stuff. Vengeance will be hers; speaking of her aunt’s death, she says: ‘Nordau did not

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learn about it until quite late in the day. His reaction to the revelation is of no interest to me at this point; an eye for an eye, I say’ (BW, p. 123). The third story from Blood and Water we shall consider sits firmly at the burlesque end of the comic Gothic spectrum. The butt of its humour is the popular notion of male sexuality as an imperative that must be obeyed. Arthur Brittan suggests that such a view has not been limited to everyday discourse but is to be found in some academic theory: There is supposed to be something in a man’s make-up which pushes him into acts of self-assertiveness. In its extreme form, this view imbues his sexuality with transcendental power which brooks no interference. Men are at the mercy of strong drives over which they have very little control.27 ‘The Hand of a Wanker’ represents male sexual desire running rampant and signals through the colloquial usage in its title that it is a comic piece. There is a clear homage to the 1946 film The Beast with Five Fingers in which the severed hand of a concert pianist wreaks havoc; McGrath takes the discarded hand with a life of its own and gives it a comic turn of a specifically sexual nature.28 In so doing his story offers a comic take on a practice that caused much anxiety among the Victorians but tends to be the stuff of jokes and casual insults in the present day.29 The story is set in ‘an East Village night-club called Babylonia’ (BW, p. 144): an indication that this is a comic parody not unconnected with the Book of Revelations, so that this ‘beast’ takes on a comic epic quality in a context already characterized by a measure of sexual depravity. Characterized by the legendary hairy palm of the compulsive masturbator (in this case the mark of the beast), the hand makes its appearance in this seedy nightclub one late summer afternoon. Instead of evoking horror in the three people who first see it, it is merely an object of curiosity and, indeed, amusement: The blood on the stump was black, and congealed, though the fingernails were nicely trimmed. Dicky looked from Lily to Gunther and back to the hand. Tittering slightly, he took the cigarette from his mouth and put it between the fingers. (BW, p. 145) Its subsequent disappearance is described in comic terms, effected by the choice of verbs: it ‘scampered’, ‘hurled itself’ and ‘scuttled’ (BW, p. 147). Everything the hand does demonstrates that it is a beast with independent motivation and it is regarded as such by everyone, including

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its previous owner. It soon demonstrates that it is both mobile and dangerous – to comic effect. It half throttles the lead singer of ‘Saint Mark and the Evangelists’ after he dedicates the song ‘Witch-Bitch’ to his mother (BW, pp. 147–149) and lurks down the u-bend in the ladies’ washroom only to surface when the toilet is in use: ‘the temptation clearly had been irresistible’ (BW, p. 149). The transvestite Yvonne comments, ‘So at least we know it’s amphibious’ (BW, p. 149). At this point a stranger, the owner of the hand, appears and explains his affliction and the reason for cutting off his own hand. At no point is surprise expressed that the hand has an independent existence. It is spoken of as if it is an animal: ‘I should have drowned it’, he says, and explains that instead he kept it in a shoebox under the sink (‘I come from a sentimental race’), adding, ‘Oh, there were holes in it’ (BW, p. 151). He brings out a meat cleaver and suggests a plan to rid the club of its noxious and irritating presence. The last section of this short story is headed: DER TOD UND DIE HAND [sic], a clear parodic reference to the conflation of death and sexual desire embodied in the mythical motif of ‘Death and the Maiden’ which, although it has its roots in ancient history, established itself in German culture from the Renaissance on as ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’.30 In this section of the story, the colours of Babylon, purple and red, as in Revelations, are very much in evidence. The ironically named Lily de Villiers is set up as bait ‘looking her best’ in the trappings of a conventional sexual femininity: mascara, scarlet lips, rouge, ‘her little leather skirt riding high up thighs sheathed in black seamed nylon stockings with runs and ladders and other tarty insignia’ – ‘She was the whore of Babylon and she was there to bait the hand’ (BW, p. 153). The task of dispatching the hand falls to the epically named young German, Gunther (he of ‘the purple lederhosen’ and ‘magnificent physique’ [BW, p. 144]). Eventually, the hand appears ‘pattering across the floor like a hideous pink crab, slapping the linoleum as it scampered towards her in lust and intemperate haste’ (BW, p. 153). After Lily has seized the hand and ‘plucked it from her bosom like a limpet from a rock’ (BW, p. 154), Gunther hacks it into small pieces with the cleaver. ‘And Lily’, says Dicky (also a specially chosen name, surely) to the shaken woman, ‘my poor dear Lily. A hero!’ ‘Heroine’, she corrects him. This is then repeated three times by each of the other main characters in an incantation. Several aspects of the comic turn in this story about male sexuality are worthy of comment. The widely held belief that men are victims of their sexual urges which lead them into trouble is represented by the synechdochic hand. The hand signifies the need for gratification that

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cannot be contained (the stranger’s other hand now displays the same ‘small clump of fine black hairs’) (BW, p. 150). The stranger tells of how the severed hand had returned to him ‘in the depths of the night’ and how he had cast it out in disgrace in the section entitled ‘The Curse of Human Desire’ (BW, p. 151). This is a displaced phallic symbol, the penis once removed (as it were). The fear of castration that the severed hand might be seen as representing is encountered comically. The focus is on the hand itself, not the stump that is left behind. The appendage displays autonomy but its behaviour is predictable and mischievous: throttling the male and groping the female. This is a form of grotesque and also a form of automaton. It is grotesque for what should be a piece of dismembered and discarded flesh takes on the attributes of a rogue pet. It is an automaton in that it is driven as if by clockwork. There is a twist at the end of the story: ‘Feed it to the lizard. Long live the hand’, is the cryptic parting shot of the stranger (BW, p. 154). In this Babylon, the dragon is no more than a lizard in a glass case. Given the hand’s apparently indestructible qualities, however, there is an intimation that it may take an even more perverse sexually predatory form once fed to the lizard. Recycling through the food chain also occurs in McGrath’s 1989 novel, The Grotesque which, like Blood and Water, tells the tale of violent deeds in an English country house. As in that story, the narrative method is crucial, and in this, McGrath’s first full-length novel, there is a sophisticated postmodern layering of unreliable narration. In most of McGrath’s work and certainly in his novels, the Gothic past is a relatively recent place. It is for the most part the past of an earlier twentieth century, a recent historical period rendered through McGrath’s postmodern narratives as imbued with threat. Respectability is demonstrated to be no protection against insanity or guarantee against outrage, as Blood and Water so clearly demonstrates. If that story concludes with a quotation from Melville, The Grotesque takes its epigraph from Baudelaire: Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.31 Such defamiliarization of human experience with its inversion of perspective provides the keynote for McGrath’s ‘triumph of grotesquerie’ (as one reviewer called it),32 which exploits all the comic potential of

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the grotesque in a self-referential way. McGrath himself has commented on the appropriateness of the epigraph: that particular idea of Baudelaire’s was very appropriate to the grotesque with the ideas of biological breakdown, and the fusion between the biological, the animal, and the human which were very much at the centre of the book.33 The novel situates itself in a variety of traditions and plays one off against the other. This is a country house novel (although more perversely so than even The Egoist) set in a dwelling reminiscent of Tony Last’s Hetton in A Handful of Dust, a whodunnit (was it the butler?), an eccentric novel of manners and a modern Gothic novel. The bones of the plot (a poor but intended pun) are simple. A harmless and rather effete young man called Sidney comes into the Coal household as the fiancé of the daughter, Cleo. At about the same time, Lady Harriet Coal employs a new butler, Fledge, and his wife, Doris. Sidney disappears unaccountably and eventually, after the persistence of his mother, his bones are found out on the marsh. His body appears to have been fed to pigs at the pig farm attached to the Coals’ estate. The manager George Lecky, a faithful servant of Sir Hugo Coal, is found guilty of Sidney’s murder and is hanged but not before accusing Sir Hugo of the crime at the last moment. In the course of these events, Sir Hugo Coal suffers what he describes as a ‘cerebral accident’ and is confined to a wheelchair in a cataleptic state. The novel is narrated by Sir Hugo. Thus its central premise is that we have access to his mind, in which an apparently coherent narrative of past recent events – at least at first – is unfolded. We hear the voice of an unspeaking subject but one, we increasingly suspect, who is not to be considered a reliable narrator. We are never given any other point of view but his, yet he admits to describing events that he could not possibly have witnessed. The Grotesque therefore gives us a narrator who, in any naturalistic sense, is not able to narrate anything but is rather condemned to a fate reminiscent of a Poe victim. He is as mute as the dinosaur bones he keeps in the barn, fancying himself a ‘gentleman naturalist’, a palaeontologist. Confined to his wheelchair following what may have been a cerebral haemorrhage or may have been (as he claims) an assault by his butler, he has been pronounced cataleptic by a neurologist and deemed to be ‘ontologically dead’ (G, p. 16). From being master of the house, he has become passive watcher and listener, tended to by his butler’s inebriate wife as if he were a baby. Paradoxically,

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for the reader he retains total control over the story of what has happened in his household. In order to construct an alternative narrative, the reader must read against the grain and between the lines. His sardonic textual voice is seductive and gives language to a subjectivity that is detached, ontologically certain and, we increasingly suspect, deluded. In The Grotesque, we find ourselves in a rural landscape not dissimilar to that of Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, the very names signalling that we are in similar darkly comic – and indeed, grotesque – territory. The country house is named ‘Crook’, a name multiple in its connotations but suggesting here not only the criminal but also the deformity echoed in the name of the nearest town, Pock-on-the-Fling, which evokes an image of the ravages of disease with a hint of the ludicrous. ‘Ceck’ is the nearest village, giving rise to such variations as Ceck’s Marsh and Ceck’s Bottom, the kind of name that is always good for a laugh, and reminiscent of the ludicrous place names that feature in Castle Rackrent. The hapless victim of the crime at Crook is Sidney Giblet, a name that destines him, it would appear, to be – unlike Carter’s heroine in ‘A Company of Wolves’ – somebody’s meat. Crook’s new butler is called Fledge, a name perhaps evoking the idea of metamorphosis because of its closeness to ‘fledgling’ but also curiously close to ‘Flitch’, the dismissed manservant in The Egoist. Whereas Flitch remains an irritating and subversive presence just beyond the bounds of Patterne Hall, however, Fledge enters the house as senior manservant and moves seemingly inexorably to occupy its centre. That Crook is to be seen as a Gothic house is signalled in various parodic ways. Sir Hugo indulges in several purple passages of sublime landscape description, of which the following is only a sample: The clouds had massed in a peculiar arrowlike formation, the tip of which seemed fastened to the sinking sun, so that they swept towards the horizon in two great converging wings, all in bitty, vaporous flecks that shifted through a layered spectrum from the pale pastel blues and grays of the upper strata through violets and purples to rich, sultry crimsons that merged almost imperceptibly with the blackness of the land. (G, p. 40) Set in this landscape, Crook and Sir Hugo’s relationship with it take on a Poe-esque quality. His reflections are worth quoting at length: As I reached the rusting, wrought-iron gates of Crook, so overgrown with grass and ivy that they would never again be closed; and so up

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the drive between the trees, the evening chorus of the birds raucous in my ears. Rounding the bend in the drive, I found Crook heaving up before me against a sky in which the last dim light still faintly lingered. Black against that darkling air, no line straight, it seemed a great, skirted creature that rose by sheer force of will to thrust its wavering gables at the sky – a foundering mastodon, it seemed, a dying mammoth, down on its knees but tossing its tusks against heaven in one last flourish of revolt. In the windows downstairs the lights shone into the night, and thus did the life of the house still burn, still feebly burn, and then, only then, as I stood at the bend in the drive and leaned, panting, after my climb, on my walking stick, only then did I experience a sudden intimation of mortality: my house would go down as I would go down; we were the last of the line. (G, pp. 41–42) There are Gothic echoes here, perhaps of du Maurier’s Manderley, certainly of Poe’s House of Usher. Sir Hugo’s ‘foundering mastodon’ metaphor in evoking the prehistoric echoes his own preoccupation with assembling the bones of the dead dinosaur he keeps in the barn, something that continues to exercise him and work for which he cannot seem to gain any recognition by the wider scientific community. His identity as a gentleman scientist, a familiar nineteenthcentury figure, is an anachronism in the mid-twentieth century world of professionalized science. The phrase ‘great skirted creature’ indicates a personification of the house as feminine in relation to Sir Hugo’s masculinity; both seem fated to destruction. As Anne Williams has pointed out, early Gothic fiction was ‘a narrative built over a cultural fault line – the point of conjunction between the discourses of alliance and sexuality, in Foucault’s sense of those terms’.34 If Sidney Giblet had married Sir Hugo’s daughter, he would have become one of the family. As it is, his ghost returns to haunt Crook after his death in true Gothic style. Only Cleo sees him and tells her father (before his ‘cerebral accident’) of the apparition, who cuts a figure that is at the same time faintly ludicrous and gruesome, a mixture of the spectral and Bertie Wooster: he ‘was chalk-white, translucent, and tinged with a faintly greenish hue. He smelled unpleasantly sweet . . . he was wearing the suit he’d been in the night he disappeared, a beige tweed affair, jacket and plus fours, with a faint check pattern in yellow and sky-blue.’ Sidney’s ghost, however, reveals an unpleasant truth; the ‘great angry gash beneath his chin’ indicates that he has not simply disappeared but has been the victim of foul play and he joins the

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company of Dr Cadwallader as an ill-fated house guest of the degenerate aristocracy (G, p. 164). Crook is placed in an identifiable landscape, however; time and place are both specific. We are told that this is Berkshire, Sir Hugo gives an account of a visit to Bloomsbury (albeit to see Sidney’s mother, a Dickensian grotesque figure in a grotesque Bloomsbury residence of Dickensian aspect)35 and we are informed that the year in which the story begins is 1949. McGrath’s novels are often set in the recent past of the twentieth century, which is, in the words of L.P. Hartley, ‘a foreign country’, one characterized by ubiquitous discomfort and stultifying social mores.36 The specificity of the year in The Grotesque places it on a cusp, at the end of a decade that had seen a destructive world war and changes in British society signalling the incipient demise of empire and the further erosion of a class system that had supported a large servant class. The novel’s opening offers Sir Hugo’s reflections on the qualities of a good butler: Butlers, I think, are born, not made; the qualities of a good butler – deference, capability, a sort of dignified servility – are qualities of character that arise in cultures where a stable social hierarchy has existed, essentially undisturbed, for centuries. (G, p. 11) Sir Hugo recognizes that Fledge ‘is not a born butler’ (G, p. 11) and recollects that he has been appointed with his wife by Lady Harriet, as one half of a married couple. He has come from Kenya, where ‘they had been in the employ of a coffee planter . . . a man who apparently was trampled by an ox and expired without writing them references’ (G, p. 17). He is a man not vouched for, his excuse being comically conclusive and allowing of no argument. Animals are very significant in this novel, a novel in which a number of significant boundaries (social, sexual, in the form of the narrative itself) are breached and where, most significantly of all, the boundaries of the human are rendered unstable. Like Cherubina’s ‘mother’, Sir Hugo keeps a pet toad, ‘Herbert’, who is named after his father-in-law. Toads are usually considered slimy and repulsive: abject creatures, in fact. In The Monk, for example, Agnes in describing her time in the dungeon with her dead baby says: ‘Sometimes I felt the bloated Toad, hideous and pampered with the poisonous vapours of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my bosom.’37 In a gruesome comic turn, Sir Hugo treats Herbert as a pampered pet, allowing him to tuck into a ‘plateful of squirmy white maggots’ at (indeed on) the dinner table.

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Hebert was a toad and I kept him in a glass tank in my study. Because I fed him well, and because he did not take much exercise, he was extremely large. I did not find him monstrous, however, nor was there anything revolting to me in the spectacle of a toad eating maggots at the dinner table. These maggots (which are produced by the eggs of the cheese-fly, Piophila casei) George Lecky, my gardener, collected for me on the pig farm down in Ceck’s Bottom. (G, p. 14) The toad is thus implicated in the cyclical grotesque that is at the heart of the book.38 Its connection with the pig farm introduces early on the central motif of the pig. In using this motif, the novel draws on traditions of the grotesque as identified in relation to the carnivalesque. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have identified the ambiguous relationship between human beings and the pig. Drawing on Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque, in their well-known book The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, they claim that Bakhtin shifts between two models of the grotesque and of the fair. In the first model, the grotesque is simply the opposite of the classical; in the second: the grotesque is formed through a process of hybridization or inmixing of binary opposites, particularly of high and low, such that there is a heterodox merging of elements usually perceived as incompatible, and this latter version of the grotesque unsettles any fixed binaryism.39 Arguing that the pig occupied a focal symbolic place at the fair (and in the carnival), being both celebrated and used as scapegoat, they sketch out a theory of its ambivalence, both the object of disgust for its filthy habits and admired for its qualities of usefulness. They also point out that although within Christian discourse the pig was ‘usually emblematic of definable sin, from the seventeenth century it became increasingly associated by the bourgeoisie with offences against good manners. The pig was demonized less for its supposed evils than for its rustic boorishness from which polite citizens must dissociate themselves.’40 They quote Edmund Leach who argues that, kept in close proximity with the family, pigs transgressed major oppositions and co-ordinates on the cultural grid that supports human identity. Sir Hugo who ‘narrates’ is able to see and hear but not give any sign of consciousness, his appearance and behaviour being characterized by a ‘compulsive grimace’, ‘grinding teeth’, ‘stertorous breathing’, all of which are accompanied by, in the words of the doctor, ‘guttural phonation not unlike the grunting of a pig’ (G, p. 16). Believing himself ontologically very much alive but

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condemned to ‘vegetate for the rest of his days’, Sir Hugo has come to the conviction that his destiny is ‘to be a grotesque’ (G, p. 17). In Sir Hugo’s narration, his dreams are offered up to the reader for symbolic interpretation and seem to point to repressed homosexual desire. In his dream about Mrs Fledge, the drab housekeeper is transformed into a provocative and seductive figure who carries the signifiers of both femininity and masculinity. She is wearing her uniform and her stockinged thigh sports suspenders. However, she is also wearing men’s underpants ‘oddly enough, like my own’, she has a ‘curiously deep voice’ and she turns her back to him; ‘she offered me her bottom’ (G, pp. 50–51). Sir Hugo, in his dreaming state, becomes tangled up in his country gentleman’s tweeds and the trousers at his ankles prevent him from moving: ‘the feeling of urgent, cruelly blocked desire became almost intolerable’ and he exclaims, ‘I simply could not move!’ (G, p. 51), anticipating the paralysis that is to later overtake him. At this moment, to his horror, Fledge appears in his dream, and ‘I sat up in bed with a shout’ (G, p. 51). This suggests that the sexual desire is for Fledge himself but the social taboo against homosexuality prevents Sir Hugo from acknowledging this. He is, in the words of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a victim of ‘homosexual panic’.41 In the affair between Lady Harriet and Fledge that may or may not be a figment of Sir Hugo’s imagination, it is Fledge’s body that is described in intimate detail when he fantasizes about their sexual encounters. Fledge’s naked body is the object of desire, with ‘its fine penis rising stiff and faintly throbbing from that soft fleece of red-brown pubic hair’ (G, p. 169). In Sir Hugo’s imagination, Fledge is a figure of indiscriminate and voracious sexuality. Thinking he has witnessed him in an embrace with Sidney, his reaction musters all the class and gender conditioning that have made him what he is: Men had been sent down from Oxford for less, in my day. . . . My first reaction was to try and determine who bore the major responsibility for the incident. Fledge was the older man, of course, but Sidney was his better, in terms of social class, and in the fleeting glimpse I’d had of them it was Sidney who seemed, so to speak, ‘the aggressive’ party. (G, p. 57) Sir Hugo’s faithful servant, the manager of the pig farm, George Lecky, takes the blame for Sidney’s ultimate fate as pig swill, claiming almost to the end that his body had been found out on the marsh. His explanation of what actually happened, only revealed to Mrs Giblet the night before

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his execution, has the ring of truth: he had been fetched by Sir Hugo to help him remove Sidney’s body from the grounds of Crook following what Sir Hugo claimed had been an accident: ‘Sidney’s neck had been cut so deeply that he feared the head would come away from the body’ (G, p. 182). If indeed it is Sir Hugo who killed Sidney because of homosexual jealousy, then this leads to the breaking of a far stronger taboo, cannibalism, albeit once removed. Food mingles with both sex and death in this novel. Sir Hugo envisages Fledge seducing Harriet for the first time in the larder in a moment of comic incongruity characteristic of the novel: ‘But now she looks up into his face, and there between the pickled gherkins and the rhubarb chutney a rather warm, liquid event occurs inside her’ (G, p. 77). By arranging for the disposal of Sidney’s body by having him fed to the pigs, Sir Hugo has sent Sidney into the food chain, to be consumed, once removed, in the ham and pork from Crook’s pig farm at Ceck’s Bottom. The ham appears in sandwiches at a Christmas reception for the local Roman Catholic community, of which Harriet is a stalwart. The ‘light eschatological chat’ he indulges in with the local priest provides an opportunity for an oblique grotesque joke about cannibalism when he says that he refuses to accept transubstantiation (the Roman Catholic belief that the communion is transformed into the body and blood of Christ) (G, p. 83). If religion fares badly at the hands of the grotesque narrator, then so does the mastering discourse of psychoanalysis, which is here located in Sir Hugo’s nephew, the appropriately named Victor Horn. Victor is ‘a fat boy’ who plans to be a psychoanalyst when he grows up and has, most suitably, brought a copy of Freud’s Totem and Taboo with him as Christmas reading. It is the precocious Victor who, on hearing an outburst from Cleo about a ‘hideous, stinking, evil thing . . . crawling around outside this house’, says to his father, ‘Daddy . . . I think that’s hysteria, but I’m not sure what sort’ (G, p. 96). Meanwhile, as Sir Hugo reflects, ‘We had all, indirectly and unknowingly, eaten Sidney’ (G, p. 162). Ultimately, therefore, all that remains of Sidney is found out on the marsh in the form of gnawed bones. In the end his fate is no different from that of the dinosaur in the barn, no different from that of all of us: to become bones. The dismembered dinosaur is multiply significant. It is judged to have been violent and carnivorous, both features echoing the events at Crook; the close association of it with Sir Hugo suggests that he may have had more to do with Sidney’s violent end than his own narrative is telling. Sir Hugo has spent much of his time out in the barn trying to assemble the bones in the right order but some are missing

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and there are doubts as to whether he has put things in the right place. This is an obvious analogy with his narrative; both are unreliable. It is implied, however, that this is not simply Sir Hugo’s problem: the dinosaur is the focus of a quasi-empiricism that tends to make claims for scientific truth but is based on speculation. It may, indeed, be an image for Sir Hugo himself, already an anachronism in the post-war world, just as his house is likened to a prehistoric beast. As Sir Hugo moulders in his wheelchair, the dinosaur bones become covered in fungus and he dreams that he is growing into the chair, ‘in the process of turning into a sort of giant plant’ and has a vision of how he would ‘merge organically with Crook’ (G, p. 157). Whatever the case, Sir Hugo remains in his wheelchair, often grunting like a pig and sometimes turned to the wall. Sir Hugo is cared for by Fledge’s wife, Doris, who undergoes a symbolic castration on his behalf when she inadvertently chops off her finger while preparing food in the kitchen and sits drinking gin while she bleeds helplessly, Herbert meanwhile lapping at the puddle of blood (G, pp. 179–180). In the manner of Dr Jekyll with Mr Hyde, Sir Hugo comes to think of himself and Fledge as each other’s double: ‘I am his grotesque double’, he says ‘he reads in me an outward sign of his own corruption’ (G, p. 173). Yet, he maintains it is Fledge who is the true grotesque: just as the gargoyle on a Gothic church was a defeated demon forced to serve as a sewer, so, inversely, am I forced to serve as a gargoyle in this anti-cathedral, this hell-hall that Fledge has made of Crook. (G, p. 173) But has he? If it is indeed Sir Hugo who murdered Sidney, then the ‘hell-hall’ is of his own making. If Fledge is having sex with Lady Harriet, then he is giving her the kind of satisfaction that was not available from her sexually arid husband who states after his account of the dream featuring Doris that he had ‘not experienced sexual desire for – well, for a good many years’ (G, p. 51). Fledge has adopted the garb and manner of the English country gentleman and has moved to the centre of Crook. Sir Hugo’s judgement that ‘a change of costume did not transform him . . . into a gentleman’ seems irrelevant. Fledge may lack ‘something essential . . . a certain facial creasing that would denote affable scepticism and the expectation of deference’, but this is the judgement of a ‘dinosaur’ in the post-war world: the balance of power has very clearly shifted to Fledge (G, p. 152). The master narrative that sustained for so long the aristocracy’s conviction of its own superiority, so well expressed by Sir Hugo here, had been long under threat and in the

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mid-twentieth century was manifesting itself in a number of texts. McGrath cites Joseph Losey’s film, The Servant, for example, as an influence on his novel.42 For Sir Hugo, closure comes only with a transcendent vision of the dead George, a faithful servant almost until the end, who holds out his arms to him and welcomes him, presumably, into the world of the dead. These Gothic works of the 1980s by Banks and McGrath are clearly postmodern texts, engaging ironically with a Gothic legacy in order to pose the question of what it means to be a man (not a woman) in the contemporary world. This is explored through comic turns born of gruesome incongruity, of taboos violated. There is an engagement with the destabilization of the powerful discourses that have sustained class and gender, most notably psychoanalysis in McGrath’s work. The comic turn in these fictions constitutes a textual bravado in the face of real cultural anxieties.

Afterword

In the midst of a welter of ‘spoofs’ and ‘ironic slasher movies’, ‘comic Gothic’ has perhaps been easily dismissed as parody in its lower sense. Preoccupied with the anxieties of modernity, deadly serious scholarly criticism of texts that disturb and shock has dominated the rise of Gothic studies. Thus, we have argued, the value of the comic turn in Gothic texts has been largely overlooked. What we have tried to do in Gothic and the Comic Turn is to open up a new approach to reading Gothic texts, one that recognizes the play of surface effects as they locate themselves on the unstable boundary between humour and horror and transgress it in both directions. We have avoided becoming mired in the attempt to set up a taxonomy of humour or of comic effects, just as we have resisted the depth model of reading offered by psychoanalysis. Rather than attempt a comprehensive survey of texts that might be deemed ‘comic Gothic’, we have offered the selective study appropriate to a book of this length. By focusing on exemplar texts, we have tried to sketch out a rough trajectory of the comic turn in Gothic from The Castle of Otranto to the 1980s. In so doing, we have concentrated mainly on British writing but have also considered the work of two North American writers where thematic links are strong. We recognize that there is much work to be done on Gothic and the Comic Turn in popular culture. We have deliberately avoided film, for example, acknowledging that this is a fertile field for the application of some of the ideas we have tried to develop but not one in which we have expertise. We hope that other scholars will now brave the difficult task of writing about the comic in Gothic in all its manifestations. If we have raised fruitful lines of enquiry, this book will have done its job. A recognition of the hybrid nature of Gothic is essential. If indeed, as we have accepted, Gothic gives textual expression to the fragmentation of 165

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the modern subject, then we must recognize that this expression is characterized by irony, scepticism and the enjoyment of comic incongruity even as it engages with anguish, fear, isolation and alienation. We must recognize that comic Gothic is a spectrum and the comic turns within Gothic range through parody (for which we make exceptional claims); burlesque; comic grotesque; incongruity; comic inversion of the abject; exploitation of liminality in Gothic fiction. There is no one form of comic turn. We must continue to recognize that the performative emphasis of Gothic, an emphasis that has been there since its inception, means that it frequently ‘bares the device’. This is evidence of its self-reflexive nature, which is made even more emphatic by the comic turn. Above all, we must remember that, as with jokes, ‘it’s the way I tell ‘em’. In the comic turn we see the deliberate exploitation of the stylized theatricality of the Gothic; a concern with the artificial, marionettes and automata; a ludic quality that involves an obsession with fakery. Even as it creates its effects of terror or horror and claims authenticity, it reveals its mechanisms. If Gothic is seen as a critique of modernity, the comic turn indicates a deconstructive turn inherent within it. Such a perspective breaks the cultural twinning of the Gothic and the psychoanalytic (which tends to pathologize laughter as the psychopathology of everyday life, embracing it in its master narrative). The comic turn within Gothic does not just function as relief and is not only negatively deconstructive; it is also dialogic, opening up new possibilities. Echoing the words of Carol Shields, it is entirely appropriate that in troubled times writers head off in the not so frivolous direction of comic fiction.

Notes Introduction 1. David Punter, The Literature of Terror, Vol. 2: The Modern Gothic (2nd edition; London: Longman, 1996), p. 184. 2. See Maurice Lévy, ‘“Gothic” and the Critical Idiom’ in Allan Lloyd-Smith and Victor Sage (eds), Gothick Origins and Innovations (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1994), pp. 1–15. 3. See, for example, Robert Miles: ‘The Gothic may evince no single dialectic, but there is broad agreement that the Gothic represents the subject in a state of deracination, of the self finding itself dispossessed in its own house, in a condition of rupture, disjunction, fragmentation’ (Gothic Writing 1750–1820 [2nd edition; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002, 1993]), p. 3. 4. William Veeder explores the therapeutic function of Gothic writing in his essay ‘The Nurturance of the Gothic: The Turn of the Screw’, Gothic Studies, 1, 1 (August 1999), pp. 47–85. 5. See Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘The Gothic and the “Otherings” of ascendant culture: the original Phantom of the Opera’ in Glennis Byron and David Punter (eds), Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 177–201. 6. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 8. 7. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 23. 8. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976; 2nd edition 1995), pp. viii, 5. 9. Ibid., p. 17. 10. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 96, 2 (1981), pp. 255–270. For later work in this area, see Andrea Henderson ‘“An Embarrassing Subject”: Use Value and Exchange Value in Early Gothic Characterization’ in Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson (eds), At the Limits of Romanticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 225–245 and Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘The Ghost of the Counterfeit in the Genesis of the Gothic’ in Allan Lloyd-Smith and Victor Sage (eds), Gothick Origins and Innovations (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1994), pp. 23–33. 11. See Philip Stevick, ‘Frankenstein and Comedy’ in George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher (eds), The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 221–239; Sybil Korff Vincent, ‘The Mirror and the Cameo: Margaret Atwood’s Comic/Gothic Novel, Lady Oracle’ in Julianne E. Fleenor (ed.), The Female Gothic (Montreal and London: The Eden Press, 1983), pp. 153–163; Paul Lewis, Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), especially Chapter 4, ‘Humor and 167

168 Notes

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Fear in the Gothic’, pp. 111–153; Victor Sage, ‘Gothic Laughter: Farce and Horror in Five Texts’ in Allan Lloyd-Smith and Victor Sage (eds), Gothick Origins and Innovations (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi Press, 1994), pp. 190–203; Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, the Uncanny and Literature (London: Palgrave, 2002), especially Chapter 1, ‘“I wants to make your flesh creep”: Dickens and the Comic Gothic’, pp. 25–53. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. vii. Walpole’s novel was first presented as a translation from the Italian and published anonymously in December 1764. However, the second edition, published in April 1765, acknowledged Walpole’s authorship and added the subtitle ‘A Gothic Story’. See E.J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 54. For the quotation from Clery, see her introduction to The Castle of Otranto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. xv. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 135. Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: 400 Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (London: Fourth Estate, 1998), p. 140. Davenport-Hines, in his reading of The Castle of Otranto as emphatically comic, sees it as ‘only a by-way leading towards Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost”’, p. 141. Taking his cue from Walpole’s Preface, Fred Botting reminds us in Gothic that: ‘A hybrid form in its inception, the Gothic blend of medieval and historical romance with the novel of life and manners was framed in supernatural, sentimental or sensational terms’ (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 45. Horace Walpole, Preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, Three Gothic Novels, p. 45. E.J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. l64. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (ed. W.S. Lewis), Vol. 40, p. 380 (New Haven, 1937–1983), as cited by E.J. Clery in her introduction to The Castle of Otranto, p. xxii. Ibid., Vol. 25, p. 5 as cited by Richard Davenport-Hines in Gothic, p. 136. See Elizabeth R. Napier, The Failure of Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an Eighteenth-Century Literary Form (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story (ed. J. Trainer) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 3. See E.J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, pp. 83–87. See Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic, p. 142. The circus seems to have originated in the eighteenth century, the first proto-circus being, according to Peter Berger, ‘an arena for equestrian exhibitions started by one Philip Astley on the outskirts of London in 1768’ (Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience [Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1997], p. 76) – four years after the publication of The Castle of Otranto. Within the literary tradition, the circus, like the Gothic effect, has frequently been used as an implicit critique of Enlightenment progress. An obvious nineteenth-century example is Charles Dickens’s use of the circus in Hard Times, published in 1854. Twentieth-century examples include Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984).

Notes

169

26. Anne Williams, ‘Monstrous Pleasures: Horace Walpole, Opera, and the Conception of Gothic’, Gothic Studies 2, 1 (April 2000), p. 108. 27. Ibid., pp. 111, 112. 28. Clowns remain ambiguous figures, often evoking fear as well as mirth. In the television series Seinfeld, there is a running joke about one of the characters’ phobia of clowns. Stephen King uses ‘Pennywise the clown’ as a herald for the nameless and amorphous monster that lurks beneath the town of Derry in his 1986 novel, It (New York: Viking, 1986). 29. Matthew Lewis, The Monk with introduction and notes by Emma McEvoy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xxviii. 30. Ann Radcliffe, The Italian: Or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 273. Page numbers appear hereafter in the text. 31. Later, Victorian writers of the Gothic were quick to exploit this mixture. See, for example, Charlotte Brontë’s description of the midnight fête scene in Chapter 38 of Villette, published in 1853. 32. Eric Bentley, The Life of Drama (New York: Antheneum, 1964) as cited in Peter Brooks’s The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 12. 33. Philip Stevick, ‘Frankenstein and Comedy’, p. 239. 34. See Juliet John, Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 35. See Robert Miles, Gothic Writing 1750–1820 for a Foucauldian/psychoanalytic reading of Radcliffe’s work in this respect. 36. Victor Sage, ‘Gothic Laughter: Farce and Horror in Five Texts’ in Allan Lloyd-Smith and Victor Sage (eds), Gothick Origins and Innovations, pp. 190, 197. 37. Ibid., p. 193. 38. Peter Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), p. 34. 39. See Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection’ in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 293–304 and Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture’ in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–20. 40. Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘The Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection’, p. 297. 41. Ibid. 42. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 20. 43. Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection’, p. 303. 44. Chris Baldick, ‘Introduction’ to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. xxiii. 45. See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (London: Methuen, 1985); Margaret Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Simon Dentith, Parody (London: Routledge, 2000). 46. Simon Dentith, Parody (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 15–16. 47. See Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 1995), p. 240, where she describes Linda Hutcheon and Brian McHale as denying or underplaying the comic character of parody.

170 Notes 48. Simon Dentith, Parody (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 11. 49. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. 6. 50. As early as 1779, James Beattie identified incongruity as a key element in provoking laughter: ‘Laughter arises from the view of two or more inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in one complex object or assemblage.’ (James Beattie, ‘On Laughter and Ludicrous Composition’ in Essays: On Poetry and Music [ed. Roger J. Robinson] [London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1996], p. 320, as cited in F.H. Buckley, The Morality of Laughter [Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003], p. 203). 51. William Hazlitt, ‘On Wit and Humour’ in Lectures on the Comic Writers (1819), London: Taylor & Hussey, p. 7. 52. Jean Paul Richter, Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s ‘School for Aesthetics’, introduced and translated by Margaret R. Hale (1804; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), p. 88. See Chapter 1 for a fuller exposition of Jean Paul Richter’s theories of humour. 53. Ibid., p. 99. 54. See Comedy: ‘An Essay on Comedy’ by George Meredith and ‘Laughter’ by Henri Bergson, ed. Wylie Sypher (1956; Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). 55. Fred Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 172. 56. Arthur Koestler, Insight and Outlook (London: Macmillan, 1949), p. 56. 57. Peter Berger, Redeeming Laughter, p. 74. 58. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory: Key Critical Concepts (London and New York: Prentice-Hall/ Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995), pp. 73–74. 59. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature translated by Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), p. 19. 60. Ibid., p. 21. 61. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 7. 62. Angela Carter, Afterword to Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (London: Quartet Books, 1974), p. 122. 63. Umberto Eco, ‘The Frames of Comic “Freedom”’ in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Carnival! (Berlin: Monton Publishers, 1984), pp. 4, 6. 64. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, p. 183. 65. Henri Bergson, ‘Laughter’ in Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy (1956; Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 82, 83. 66. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, p. 184. 67. William Paul, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia Press, 1994). 68. Berger, Redeeming Laughter, p. 202. 69. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 6. The quotation is from Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992), p. x.

Chapter 1 1. However, although it was not published until 1818, Austen’s novel was drafted during the 1790s. Thus, in its first form, it is contemporaneous with Castle Rackrent which, according to one of Edgeworth’s relations, was begun

Notes

2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

171

in 1792, eight years before its publication. (See Marilyn Butler’s introduction, p. 4, to the Penguin Classics edition of the novel and note 9 to the introduction for confirmation of this fact.) The Letters of Jane Austen, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 376–377. Cited in extract from Maurice Lévy, Le Roman ‘Gothique’ Anglaise 1764–1824 (Toulouse: Université de Toulouse, 1968) as it appears in Romantic Reassessment, Vol. 3: ‘Collateral Gothic 1’, ed. Thomas Meade Harwell (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1986), p. 178. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 58. The manuscript of The Black Book of Edgeworthstown is held by the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. As Kathryn Kirkpatrick notes, selected passages from this manuscript have been published in Harriet Jessie Butler’s and Harold Edgeworth Butler’s The Black Book of Edgeworthstown and Other Edgeworth Memories, 1585–1817 (London: Faber & Faber, 1927), ‘“Going to Law about that Jointure”: Women and property in Castle Rackrent’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 22, 1 (1996), p. 28. See, for example, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, ‘“Going to Law about that Jointure”: Women and Property in Castle Rackrent ’, p. 21 and Marilyn Butler, ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland: History, Popular Culture, and Secret Codes’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 4, 2 (2001), p. 271 for parallels between history and fiction in this respect. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, in Peter Fairclough (ed.), Three Gothic Novels (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 39. Ibid., p. 42. Critics disagree as to who wrote this preface. Butler notes in the 1992 Penguin Classics edition of the novel that ‘The Preface was probably written by R.L. Edgeworth, Maria Edgeworth’s father, though perhaps with her assistance’ p. 347, whereas Michael Neill comments ‘regardless of the extent of Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s contributions, I think it proper to treat the entire mock-editorial apparatus as Maria’s, since the decision to make it part of the novel was ultimately hers’ (‘Mantles, Quirks, and Irish Bulls: Ironic Guise and Colonial Subjectivity in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent’, The Review of English Studies (New Series) 52, 205 (2001), p. 76. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui ed. Marilyn Butler (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 62. All page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition. Marilyn Butler, ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland’, p. 273. In his second Preface to the Castle of Otranto, of course, Walpole admits this and foregrounds his agenda for a new, hybrid type of fiction which was ‘an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern’, p. 43. Marilyn Butler, ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland’, p. 270. Marilyn Butler, introduction to Penguin Classics edition of Castle Rackrent (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 32. Brian Hollingworth, Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing: Language, History, Politics (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 82. Ibid., p. 82 There is, however, a serious point behind this joke. The Bog Reclamation Act of 1771 was one of several measures taken to enable the proliferation of various kinds of leases in the eighteenth century: ‘Tenants in tail were given powers of leasing for three lives or 41 years by a statue of Charles I; other leasing powers were conferred by special legislation to encourage public works, such

172 Notes

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

as building places of worship, schools, corn mills, prisons, for mining purposes and bog reclamation.’ J.C.W. Wylie, Irish Land Law (Abingdon, Oxon: Professional Books Ltd, 1975), p. 22. Marilyn Butler, citing the research of W.A. Maguire, in ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland’, pp. 272–273. See David O’Shaughnessy for a reading of this section as Edgeworth’s ironic presentation of the dialogue between the ‘superstitious’ culture of the colonized and the ‘rational’ discourse of the colonizer. ‘Ambivalence in Castle Rackrent’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 25, 1–2 (1999), pp. 434–435. Katherine Kirkpatrick, ‘Going to Law about that Jointure’, pp. 26–27. See J.C.W. Wylie, Irish Land Law, p. 85, footnote 4. Katherine Kirkpatrick, ‘Going to Law about that Jointure’, p. 23. Michael Neill, ‘Mantles, Quirks, and Irish Bulls’, p. 86. J.C.W. Wylie, Irish Land Law, p. 21. E.J. Clery, introduction to The Castle of Otranto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. xxxii. Katherine Kirkpatrick, ‘Going to Law about that Jointure’, p. 25. Marilyn Butler, ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland’, p. 280. Michael Neill, ‘Mantles, Quirks, and Irish Bulls’, p. 88. See Michael Neill, ‘Mantles, Quirks, and Irish Bulls’, pp. 79–81 and Susan Glover, ‘Glossing the Unvarnished Tale: Contra-dicting Possession in Castle Rackrent ’, Studies in Philology 99, 3 (2002), pp. 299–300 for brief and helpful overviews of the disparate critical readings of Thady. Cf. Michael Neill, ‘These contradictions are entirely consistent with Thady’s Janus-faced attitudes towards his Rackrent masters . . .’ (‘Mantles, Quirks, and Irish Bulls’, p. 89). Michael Neill points out that the name ‘Thady’ both derives from Thaddeus (meaning, according to Alexander Cruden, he who ‘praises or confesses’) and is the Anglicized version of Tadhg, ‘which, in the bastardized form “Teague”, was at once a stock name for the sentimentally loyal Irish servant of stage comedy, and (as it still is today) an insulting Protestant term for the treacherous Irish papist’ (‘Mantles, Quirks, and Irish Bulls’, p. 87). O’Shaugnessy also comments on the ‘doubling’ of Thady, but sees it, via the work of Homi Bhabha, as indicative of the split subjectivity typical of the colonized (‘Ambivalence in Castle Rackrent’, p. 431). Susan Glover, ‘Glossing the Unvarnished Tale’, p. 308. Marilyn Butler, ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland’, p. 284. Eaton Stannard Barrett, The Heroine ed. Walter Raleigh (London: Henry Frowde, 1909), p. xi. All page numbers, which will appear hereafter in the text, are from this edition. For an example of the latter kind of reading, see Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 1. E.J. Clery and Robert Miles (eds), Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 204. Cited in Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration and Residuary Influences (1957; Metuchen, New Jersey and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1987), p. 181.

Notes

173

38. Edgar Allan Poe (?), Review of The Heroine from Southern Literary Messenger 1835, pp. 41–43 [www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/slm35b04; 13 June, 1999]. 39. Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame, p. 181. 40. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote or the Adventures of Arabella, edited by Margaret Dalziel and introduced by Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. xi. 41. Duncan Isles, ‘Johnson and Charlotte Lennox’, The New Rambler, June 1967, pp. 41–42, cited in the Oxford World’s Classics 1989 edition of The Female Quixote, p. 420. 42. Walter Raleigh, introduction to The Heroine ed. Eaton Stannard Barrett (London: Henry Frowde, 1909), pp. iii–iv. 43. Paul Lewis, ‘Gothic and Mock Gothic: The Repudiation of Fantasy in Barrett’s Heroine’, English Language Notes 21, 1 (September, 1983), p. 45. 44. Gary Kelly, ‘“Unbecoming a Heroine”: Novel Reading, Romanticism, and Barrett’s The Heroine’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 45, 2 (September 1990), p. 221. 45. Ibid., pp. 220–241, 226, 227, 241. 46. Jacqueline Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 155. 47. Paul Lewis, ‘Gothic and Mock Gothic’, p. 52. 48. Jacqueline Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction, pp. 159–160. 49. Gary Kelly, ‘Unbecoming a Heroine’, p. 227. 50. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 26. 51. Glen Cavaliero, The Alchemy of Laughter: Comedy in English Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 60. 52. A list of other texts drawn upon by Barrett in The Heroine is included in the 1927 edition of the novel, introduced by Michael Sadleir, and published in London by Elkin, Mathews and Marrot, Ltd. 53. Gary Kelly, ‘Unbecoming a Heroine’, p. 233. 54. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, p. 123. 55. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, p. xxvii. 56. Jonathan Lamb, ‘The Comic Sublime and Sterne’s Fiction’ in Richard Kroll (ed.), The English Novel: Smollett to Austen (London and New York: Longman, 1998), p. 148. 57. See Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). 58. See Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), especially Chapter 2. 59. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. 26. 60. Daniel Cottom, The Civilized Imagination: A Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 61. See Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 163–164, 170–175. 62. J.A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England 1550–1750 (London: Longman, 1984), p. 145. 63. We would like to record here our gratitude to Sue Chaplin for her helpful comments on this part of the chapter.

174 Notes 64. Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letter Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 112 as cited in Jacqueline Belanger, ‘Some Preliminary Remarks on the Production and Reception of Fiction Relating to Ireland, 1800–1829’, Reading the Romantic Text Vol. IV, No. 2 (www.cf.ac.uk/ncap/corvey/articles/cc04). 65. Jacqueline Belanger, ‘Some Preliminary Remarks’, p. 4. 66. Edmund Burke, Letter to a Noble Lord in The Works of Edmund Burke (Michigan: Scholarly Press, 1965) Vol. V, p. 187. Cited in Sue Chaplin, ‘Speaking of Dread: The Law, Sensibility and the Sublime in Eighteenth-Century Fiction’; doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Salford, 2001, p. 51. 67. Susan Moller Okin, ‘Women and the Making of the Sentimental Family’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 11 (1982), p. 72 cited in Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 226. 68. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, World’s Classics edition 1989, p. xxvii. 69. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. 6. 70. Leslie J. Moran, ‘Law and the Gothic Imagination’ in Fred Botting (ed.), The Gothic (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), p. 87. 71. Ibid., p. 88. 72. See Alison Milbank’s entry on ‘The Sublime’ in Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.), The Handbook to Gothic Literature (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 226–232 for a brief and helpful overview of the sublime in literature and in theory. 73. Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, 23) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 74. David A. Kent, ‘On Gary Dyer’s British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832’, Romantic Circles Reviews, Romantic Circles (www.rc.umd.edu/reviews/dyer). 75. Margaret Rose begins her extensive 1993 study with the following words: ‘When I first published on parody some twenty years ago now it was still being treated by many critics as a rather lowly comic form which had been of little real significance in the history of literature or of other arts’ (Margaret Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-Modern [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p. 1). 76. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. 4. 77. Thomas A. Schmid, Humour and Transgression in Peacock, Shelley, and Byron: A Cold Carnival (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), p. 30. 78. Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame, p. 180. 79. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 156, 157. 80. Devendra Varma, The Gothic Flame, p. 180. 81. Horace Walpole, Preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, p. 43. 82. Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s ‘School for Aesthetics’ introduced and translated by Margaret R. Hale (1804; Detroit: Wayne State University, 1973), pp. 88–89. 83. Thomas Schmid, Humour and Transgression, p. 15. 84. Margaret R. Hale (ed.), Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s ‘School for Aesthetics’, p. 15. 85. Robert Phiddian, Swift’s Parody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 13–14, as cited in Simon Dentith, Parody (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 15–16. 86. The phrase is taken from his A Rhetoric of Irony (1974) and is cited by Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. 94.

Notes

175

Chapter 2 1. Julian Wolfreys, ‘Preface’ in Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (eds), Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century (London: Palgrave, 2000), p. xiv. 2. Horst S. Daemmrich, for example, comments on ‘the fascinating combination of realistic elements and fantastic visions in Hoffmann’s narrations’ (Horst S. Daemmrich, The Shattered Self in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Tragic Vision [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973], p. 19). 3. Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’ (1919) in Sigmund Freud: The Penguin Freud Library (London: Penguin Books, 1985), Vol. 14: ‘Art and Literature’, p. 339. 4. Ibid., p. 348. 5. Ibid., pp. 348–349. 6. For a survey of psychoanalytic readings of ‘The Sandman’, see James McGlathery, Mysticism and Sexuality: E.T.A. Hoffmann (Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1981). 7. Nicholas Royle has also suggested that ‘Freud’s summary does not simply describe (accurately or inaccurately) the contents of Hoffmann’s narrative; it reveals what is in or about the narrative that most affects, intrigues, haunts Freud’ (Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003], p. 40). 8. Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, p. 375. 9. ‘The Sandman’ in E.T.A. Hoffmann, Tales of Hoffmann trans. James Kirkup (London and Glasgow: Blackie, 1966), p. 34. All page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition. We have adopted the spellings of the characters’ names used by Kirkup in this translation. 10. According to Nathanael’s nurse, ‘he’s a bad man and comes to children when they won’t go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes until, streaming with blood, they pop out of their heads. Then he throws the eyes in a sack and carries them off to the dark of the moon to feed his little ones with; they sit there in a nest with their hooked beaks, like owls, with which they peck away at the naughty children’s eyes’ (S, p. 36). 11. Joseph Andriano describes Klara as ‘a kind of Enlightenment heroine, toward whom he [Nathanael] is therefore somewhat ambivalent’. Joseph Andriano, Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction (University Park, PA.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 53. 12. Some critics see Nathanael’s pledging himself to Olympia as symbolizing the Romantic artist’s choice of the world of imagination over the philistine’s embrace of instrumental reason. The most recent to take this view is Birgit Röder in A Study of the Major Novels of E.T.A. Hoffmann (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2003), p. 60. 13. According to James McGlathery, this is due to ‘unconscious sexual guilt and panic’ (James McGlathery, Mysticism and Sexuality: E.T.A. Hoffmann, p. 57), a view challenged by Joseph Andriano whose Jungian reading sees Nathanael withdrawing his projected anima from Klara and directing it instead at Olympia as his feminine ideal (Joseph Andriano, Our Ladies of Darkness, p. 54). Birgit Röder suggests that, ‘Ultimately it is her [Klara’s] reluctance – or inability – to derive pleasure from the world of fantasy that drives him, quite literally, mad’ (Röder, p. 64).

176 Notes 14. In McGlathery’s reading, the sexual guilt and panic are exacerbated by Nathanael’s horror of having bought a telescope from Coppola in order to ‘ogle’ Olympia (James McGlathery, Mysticism and Sexuality: E.T.A. Hoffmann, p. 58); this is not explicit in the text, however. 15. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, translated by Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), pp. 74–75. 16. Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 104. 17. James McGlathery, Mysticism and Sexuality: E.T.A. Hoffmann, p. 178. 18. See our introduction: ‘In his essay “Laughter”, written in 1900, Bergson similarly defines the “mechanical” imitation of human behaviour as a source of humour, relating marionettes and “lifeless automata” to a form of artifice that creates amusement.’ 19. ‘Ambiguous Gothic’ is a term coined by G.R. Thompson in the edited collection, Romantic Gothic Tales 1790–1840 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 26–28. 20. Horst S. Daemmrich, The Shattered Self in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Tragic Vision, p. 50. 21. In a similar way, resolution is only reached at the end of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre by the sequestering of the heroine (with her damaged hero in this case) in a country retreat. 22. Sir Walter Scott’s sharply critical assessment in 1827 did little for Hoffmann’s reputation. According to Scott, who found ‘The Sandman’ ‘wild and absurd’, the reader cannot expect ‘to discover either meaning or end further than the surprise of the moment’ (Walter Scott, Foreign Quarterly Review, 1827), p. 72. 23. In Poe’s work, there is a critical recognition that fear and humour can be closely linked; Paul Lewis, for example, recognizes the co-existence of the two in Poe’s writing but sees his bitter satiric humour submit to the fear and cruelty usually considered to be characteristic of Gothic: Over and over, when humor fails, we are left with images of fear: the raven’s shadow, the howling cat, the putrescent corpse, or the fallen house . . . We are led gradually away from this humor into an expanding horror of men driven to acts of extreme cruelty (Lewis, Paul. ‘Poe’s Humor: A Psychological Analysis’ in Studies in Short Fiction 26 [1989], pp. 531–546, 535). 24. Hawthorne’s critics have also discerned comic elements in his Gothic writing. In the words of Seymour Gross in his introduction to The House of the Seven Gables (New York: Norton, 1967), ‘in recent years various Hawthorne critics have marshalled evidence for reversing, or at least modifying the traditional image of Hawthorne as geographer of the haunted mind. Edward Wagenknecht in his Nathaniel Hawthorne (1960) and Hubert Hoeltje in his Inward Sky (1962), for example, find that Hawthorne essentially “faced the light”, that his most “prominent” quality was a “quiet, deeply joyful affirmation”. The House of the Seven Gables obviously stands at the dead center of such a view.’ Hawthorne’s Tales of Humour often employ the grotesquerie of Gothic for comic effect (‘Mrs Bullfrog’, for example). 25. Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (eds), Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century.

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26. V.S. Pritchett, George Meredith and English Comedy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), p. 34. 27. Judith Wilt, The Readable People of George Meredith (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 149. 28. George Meredith, An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (1877; London: Constable, 1919), p. 91. All page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition. 29. George Meredith, The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871; London: Constable, 1914), p. 26. All page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition. 30. Evan Harrington in the novel of the same name is the son of ‘the great Mel’, a tailor with grandiose pretensions; in Sandra Belloni, two apparent contrasts, Emilia’s father, the irresponsible artist, and the business man Mr Pole, are in the event both unreliable; the heroic actions of Carlo Ammiani (Vittoria) and Nevil Beauchamp (Beauchamp’s Career) leave their sons without fathers. 31. For a number of possible sources for Richmond Roy, see Lionel Stevenson, The Ordeal of George Meredith (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), pp. 175–176. 32. Margaret Tarratt in Ian Fletcher, Meredith Now (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 169. 33. Gillian Beer, Meredith: A Change of Masks (London: Athlone Press, 1970), p. 68. 34. J.B. Priestley, George Meredith (London, Macmillan and Co., 1927), p. 164. Gillian Beer comments in the same vein, ‘Meredith’s kinship and perceptions often seem to be with twentieth-century writers rather than with his own earlier contemporaries. The fragmented chronology, the refracted experience, the dense flux of symbol and metaphor in his novels all link him with later writers’ (Gillian Beer, Meredith: A Change of Masks, p. 5). 35. Many critics have argued an identification between Sir Austin and Meredith himself and for the text as fictionalized autobiography; Gillian Beer, for example, notes that Meredith continued to record entries for The Pilgrim’s Scrip for some time after The Ordeal was published (Gillian Beer, Meredith: A Change of Masks, p. 19). Juliet Mitchell also sees Sir Austin not just as a caution to Meredith himself but a take-off of himself for producing that caution: ‘The Pilgrim’s Scrip is the work of a sentimentalist jilted; so in a way is the novel but a sentimentalist who knows he is jilted and therefore no longer a sentimentalist’ (Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution [London: Virago, 1984], pp. 151–152). The tendency of such criticism has been to emphasize the psychological identification between the novelist and his character, which acts as a kind of catharsis for Meredith himself. 36. See W.R. Mueller, ‘Theological Dualism and the “System” in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel’, Journal of English Literary History, 18, 2 (1951), pp. 138–154. 37. See, for example, Nina Auerbach, The Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1982). 38. Lucy is a Catholic and therefore doubly an outsider figure. In contrast with traditional Gothic’s identification of Catholicism with corrupt deeds, she is represented as innocent victim. 39. Her polar opposite, in the person of the bawdily named Bella Mount (the demi-mondaine with whom Richard becomes involved after his estrangement from Lucy), suffers more at the hands of Richard than he does at hers.

178 Notes 40. George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 82. All page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition. 41. Gary Handwerk, Irony and Ethics in Narrative Structure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 4. 42. Mohammed Shaheen notes that it has been common practice to approach Meredith mainly through The Egoist and to consider him a writer of comedy and anatomist of egoism, but that this is only appropriate to works of the late 1870s. Shaheen believes that Meredith realized the limitations of comedy when he wrote to R.L. Stevenson that he yearned to finish The Egoist ‘because it came mainly from the head and had nothing to kindle imagination’. Shaheen tends to see Meredith’s comic spirit as a conservative force: ‘Comedy is the only aspect of Meredith that can be described as Victorian, in that the comic spirit is basically a moral power and comedy deals with deviations from the norm of society’ (Mohammad Shaheen, George Meredith: A Re-Appraisal of the Novels [London: Macmillan, 1981], p. 4). 43. Robert Polhemus identifies Meredith as ‘the first British novelist explicitly to reject and ridicule the dogmas of Christianity’ and to become the conscious apostle of what he called the ‘comic spirit’ (Robert Polhemus, Comic Faith [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], p. 8). 44. Judith Wilt, The Readable People of George Meredith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 148. 45. George Meredith, The Egoist (1879; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 33. All page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition. 46. Jack Lindsay in his Marxist study of Meredith calls him the ‘stereotyped man of bourgeois manufacture’ (Jack Lindsay, George Meredith [London: Bodley Head, 1956], p. 238). Willoughby’s name echoes the idea of pattern that runs through the novel, including the willow pattern story which serves as a narrative analogue. This analogue is reinforced in the epithet which Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson (a neighbour of Willoughby’s noted throughout the county for her witty epithets) coins to describe Willoughby’s new fiancée, Clara Middleton: she is ‘a dainty rogue in porcelain’ (E, p. 47). Metaphor becomes translated into artefact in the novel when the porcelain vase brought as a wedding present by Willoughby’s friend, Colonel de Craye, is shattered as a result of an unfortunate upset of the fly bringing it and its donor from the station. The ‘pattern’ of relationships embodied in Patterne Hall (which provides the restrictive setting for the novel’s action) reinforces the power of its owner and there are many hints in the novel that the Hall and its estate may be taken as representing power relations in the country at large. 47. Vernon is modelled on Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen. See Norman Kelvin, A Troubled Eden: Nature and Society in the Works of George Meredith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), pp. 110–112, for a discussion of the derivation. 48. The irrepressible Flitch is associated with magical powers. He is described by Colonel de Craye, for example, as ‘a wonderful conjurer’ and it is he who is driving the fly in which the willow pattern porcelain vase is symbolically broken. For a discussion of the role of Flitch in The Egoist, see M.G. Sundell, ‘The Functions of Flitch in The Egoist’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24 (1969), pp. 227–235.

Notes

179

49. Robert Polhemus suggests that, in contrast with Peacock, Meredith ‘makes wine a comedy of egoism, not communion’ (Robert Polhemus, Comic Faith, p. 221). 50. For a discussion of the uses of the term ‘egoist’ in late nineteenth-century England and its philosophic context, see John Goode, ‘The Egoist: Anatomy or Striptease?’ in Ian Fletcher (ed.), Meredith Now, pp. 205–230. 51. There is a hint of this early in the novel when Willoughby is described as ‘ . . . straightening his whole figure to the erectness of the letter I’ (E, p. 19). Robert Polhemus suggests that there are sexual puns at work in The Egoist and cites Willoughby’s description of the sensual quality of Clara’s hair as one of them: ‘cunninger than round locks of gold to trick the heart’, he speculates, may be ‘a daring and covertly obscene pun, one that coincides with the style of the egoist and the style of the society’ (Robert Polhemus, Comic Faith, p. 243). Could Willoughby’s forename be of the same order? 52. Gary Handwerk suggests that it is ironic that when Clara begins to wield the ‘temptingly abstract and multiapplicable word’ – Egoist – she becomes most like Sir Willoughby (Gary Handwerk, Irony and Ethics in Narrative Structure, p. 97). 53. The circulating libraries, of which Mudie’s was the most famous, exercised considerable censorship over fiction in this period, rejecting anything that was not considered to be family reading. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel had been turned down by Mudie’s. Meredith’s biographer, David Williams, comments, ‘Mudie’s thumbs-down on Feverel had shown him how dangerous even the slightest hint of carnality could be for a writer with a living to earn’ (David Williams, George Meredith [London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977], p. 129). 54. Gillian Beer states that ‘The Egoist is exceptional among Victorian novels in the closeness and intensity with which it suggests sexual revulsion’ (Gillian Beer, Meredith: A Change of Masks, p. 133). 55. Kate Millett’s feminist reading of Meredith, although applauding his feminist intentions, finds the ending of The Egoist unsatisfactory: ‘Meredith knows how to save her from the egoist, but he can think of nothing else to do for her. A life more interesting than mere mating – for good or ill – never seems to have occurred to him in connection with an intelligent young woman. This is a notably deficient and rather tritely masculine attitude; for all his good intentions regarding the crippling character of feminine education, the feudal character of patriarchal marriage, and in the egotism of male assumptions, Meredith appears incapable of transcending them and consequently mistakes the liberating turmoil of the sexual revolution for the mundane activities of a matchmaking bureau’ (Kate Millett, Sexual Politics [1969; London: Virago, 1977], p. 139).

Chapter 3 1. Neil R. Davison, ‘“The Jew” as Homme/Femme-Fatale: Jewish (Art)ifice, Trilby and Dreyfus’, Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society 8, 2–3 (2002), p. 75. 2. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936; London: Faber & Faber, 1985), p. 12. All page references, which will hereafter appear in the text, are to this edition. 3. See Jane Marcus, ‘Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic’ in M.L. Broe (ed.), Silence and Power: A Re-evaluation of Djuna Barnes (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), pp. 221–250

180 Notes

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

for a reading of the novel that sees it as exploring the political unconscious of the rise of fascism. Marcus uses Kristevan theory to make her case but she does not discuss the novel’s Gothic qualities. Interestingly, however, she does note a Hoffmannesque element in Nightwood, which might well derive from Barnes’s reading of Huysmans’s Against Nature (A Rebours), in which the Olympia of Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ is invoked. Cf. our statement in Chapter 2 that ‘In the “ambiguous Gothic” world of “The Sandman” the uncanny sits side-by-side with a mundane reality’ (p. 51). For a fascinating study of mesmerism in the nineteenth century, see Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). See also Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), especially Chapter 3, ‘Mesmerism’. Dennis Denisoff, ‘“Men of My Own Sex”: Genius, Sexuality, and George du Maurier’s Artists’ in Richard Dellamora (ed.), Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 153. George du Maurier, Trilby (1894; London: J.M. Dent, 1992), p. 253 (all page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition). See Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 63–69 for an account of Dracula’s literary antecedents. Interestingly, Neil R. Davison sees echoes of the vampire in the figure of Svengali: ‘The Jewish homme/femme fatale now becomes something akin to the lesbian vampire, examining Trilby’s mouth, tongue and chest cavity as seemingly metaphors for the vagina, clitoris, and womb’ (‘“The Jew” as Homme/Femme-Fatale’, p. 95). Miss Frances Albert Doughty, cited in J.L. and J.B. Gilder, Trilbyana: The Rise and Progress of a Popular Novel (New York: Critic Company, 1895), p. 27. Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 143. Trilby’s reception is well documented in J.L. and J.B. Gilder, Trilbyana (New York: Critic Company, 1895) and in Edward L. Purcell, ‘Trilby and Trilbymania: The Beginning of the Best-Seller System’, Journal of Popular Culture (Summer 1977), pp. 62–76. Daniel Pick speculates as to whether it was ‘the novel’s complicity with anti-semitism, the charm of its picture of Bohemia, its fascination with mesmerism, or the mournful and melancholic rendition of a lost Paris’ which made it so popular in ‘Powers of Suggestion: Svengali and the Fin-de-Siècle’ in Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (eds), Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’ (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 119. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 130. She draws here on Michael Wilson’s essay in Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds), Body Guards (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Elaine Showalter (ed.), Introduction to Trilby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xvii. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 194. Sedgwick points to Little Billee’s name as having erotic point as a result of its derivation from Thackeray’s naval ballad (Epistemology of the Closet, p. 193).

Notes

181

16. At the height of Trilby’s popularity, J.L. and J.B. Gilder report, one American ice-cream-maker was moulding his ice-cream ‘in the shape of Trilby’s ever-famous foot’ (Trilbyana, p. 23). 17. See Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque, pp. 136–148, for a more detailed discussion of the novel’s somewhat fetishistic concern with Trilby’s feet and Neil R. Davison, ‘“The Jew” as Homme/Femme-Fatale’, pp. 90–91, for the suggestion that Trilby’s foot is ‘an obvious signifier for the maternal phallus’ and that, ‘stuck out in this “erect” manner in front of her male companions’, it announces her dominating, boyish presence as a potently ‘butch femininity’. 18. Cf. Mary Russo: ‘Bohemia was a social and imaginative space where a young man could live dangerously for a while and be an artist. Women had their roles in this milieu but not as artists, not as true Bohemians. The grisette, the maid, the prostitute, the model, each had an important role to play in the lives of the Bohemians but none that exceeded the bounds of the conventions of gender in nineteenth-century France’ (The Female Grotesque, p. 130). 19. George Meredith, The Egoist (1879; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 59. 20. ‘The Sandman’ in E.T.A. Hoffmann (ed.), Tales of Hoffmann trans. James Kirkup (London and Glasgow: Blackie, 1966), p. 68. Page numbers in the text hereafter. 21. See Alison Winter, Mesmerized, p. 63 for further information on the representation of the nineteenth-century mesmerist as someone who could ‘play’ a hypnotized subject as an instrument. 22. Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web, p. 104. 23. Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of the Jew in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 65. 24. Elaine Showalter (ed.), Trilby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xxii. 25. Coincidentally, in what became his most famous stage role, Gerald du Maurier, George du Maurier’s son, played Captain Hook in the stage version of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. 26. Neil R. Davison, ‘“The Jew” as Homme/Femme-Fatale’, p. 106. 27. Ibid., p. 76. 28. Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 13–14. 29. Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 86. 30. Ibid., p. 92. 31. See Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web, pp. 135–140 for a fuller discussion of Svengali in this respect. 32. Michele Hannoosh, Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), p. 4. 33. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 16. It is worth noting here that the representation of mesmerism and the unconscious in Trilby resonates interestingly with Freudian thought. In 1892, Freud brought out a translation of Bernheim’s study of hypnosis and in the same year began to incorporate hypnosis into his treatment of ‘hysterical’ women patients. However, rather than absorbing mesmerism into the discourse of psychoanalytic enquiry as does Freud, du Maurier uses it to represent the artistic Other, identifying it as unheimlich, simultaneously acknowledging, as does Freud’s work, the untapped powers of the unconscious in the creation of art.

182 Notes 34. Even Neil R. Davison’s excellent recent article, cited several times in this chapter, in focusing mainly on Svengali, repeats this reading of the novel. 35. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 377. 36. For a fuller discussion of this issue, see Dennis Denisoff, ‘“Men of My Own Sex”: Genius, Sexuality, and George du Maurier’s Artists’ in Richard Dellamora (ed.), Victorian Sexual Dissidence and Neil R. Davison, ‘“The Jew” as Homme/ Femme-Fatale’. 37. Richard Kelly notes that by the 1890s du Maurier had espoused an ‘aggressive agnosticism’ which found its most explicit form in didactic attacks on Christianity in the novels, especially in The Martian (Richard Kelly, The Art of George du Maurier, [Hants: Scolar, 1996], p. 22). 38. Elaine Showalter (ed.), Trilby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xv. 39. Daniel Pick, ‘Svengali and the Fin-de-Siècle’, p. 115. 40. Ibid., p. 114. 41. Neil R. Davison, ‘“The Jew” as Homme/Femme-Fatale’, p. 80. 42. According to Philip Herring, Barnes had read Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit in the early 1930s. See Philip Herring, The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (New York: Viking, 1995), p. 219. Interestingly, Jane Marcus notes that the Times Literary Supplement review of Nightwood likened its ‘sickness of the soul’ to that of Céline’s experimental novel (‘Mousemeat’ in Mary Lynn Broe (ed.), Silence and Power: A Re-Evaluation of Djuna Barnes [Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 1991]), p. 196. For a more detailed discussion of Barnes’s debts to French literature, especially Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror and Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, see Avril Horner, ‘“A Detour of Filthiness”: French fiction and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood’ in A. Horner (ed.), European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 230–250. 43. For an exploration of the novel in this light, see Jane Marcus, ‘Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic’ in Mary Lynn Broe (ed.), Silence and Power, pp. 221–250. 44. There has, however, been some critical resistance to seeing Nightwood as a Gothic work. Bonnie Kime Scott notes that the novel ‘has been called, alternatively, surrealistic, Eliotic, Dantesque, fugal, Elizabethan, baroque, even gothic’ (our italics) and Diane Chisholm argues for the novel’s debts to surrealism rather than the Gothic tradition. See, respectively, Bonnie Kime Scott (ed.), The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 23 and Diane Chisholm, ‘Obscene Modernism: Eros Noir and the Profane Illumination of Djuna Barnes’, American Literature, Vol. 69, No. 1 (March 1997), especially p. 185. This refusal to acknowledge the strong Gothic legacy evident within Nightwood perhaps derives from a too limited conception of the Gothic genre. 45. Jane Marcus, ‘Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic’, p. 221. 46. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4. 47. Nora’s recollections of her grandmother are clearly based on Djuna Barnes’s memories of her unusually close relationship with her own grandmother, Zadel Barnes. For documentation (and two different readings) of this relationship, see Phillip Herring, ‘Zadel Barnes: Journalist’ and Anne B. Dalton,

Notes

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

183

‘“This is Obscene”: Female Voyeurism, Sexual Abuse, and Maternal Power in The Dove’, both in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Fall 1993), pp. 107–116 and 117–139, respectively. Diane Chisholm, citing Breton’s Nadja, has pointed out that ‘According to André Breton, the Paris twenties hosted that phase of Surrealism known as the “sleeping fits” or “Nap Period”.’ See her ‘Obscene Modernism: Eros Noir and the Profane Illumination of Djuna Barnes’ in American Literature, Vol. 69, No. 1 (March 1997), p. 201. Several critics have also suggested a link with Bellini’s opera La Sonnambula (1831). As Janet Wolff points out, in the early twentieth-century artistic communities of Paris, such as Montparnasse, ‘an active lesbian subculture produced its own gender inversion, in terms of behaviour and dress’, which allowed for the subversion of conventional bourgeois codes of behaviour. Janet Wolff, ‘The Artist and the Flâneur: Rodin, Rilke and Gwen John in Paris’ in Keith Tester (ed.), The Flâneur (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 126. While Jane Marcus is no doubt right to suggest in her article, ‘Laughing at Leviticus’, that the depiction of the circus as well as the opera in Nightwood indicates Barnes’s Rabelaisian spirit and her desire to embrace low as well as high culture, it is worth remembering that there is in French art, as Nicholas White points out in his introduction to J.-K. Huysman’s Against Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), a tradition of representing circus performers as objects of (sometimes forbidden) desire (as in the work of Degas, Rops and Seurat), which Barnes – well read in French art and literature – clearly exploited. The quotation is from T.W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 42 and is cited in David Frisby, ‘The Flâneur in Social Theory’ in Keith Tester (ed.), The Flâneur (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 91. The Hôtel Récamier was named after Juliette Récamier (1777–1849), a beautiful woman who had many literary figures as admirers including Germaine de Staël, Benjamin Constant and Chateaubriand. Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940 (London: Virago Press, 1987, 1994). See Charles Baudelaire, ‘The painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne (1863; Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1964). Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 36. Cited in Rob Shields, ‘Fancy footwork: Walter Benjamin’s notes on flânerie’ in Keith Tester (ed.), The Flâneur (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 62. Ibid., p. 75. Keith Tester (ed.), The Flâneur, pp. 6, 8. See Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, ‘Strolling in the Dark: Gothic Flânerie in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood’ in Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallaces (eds), Gothic Modernisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 78–94 for a fuller discussion of this aspect of Barnes’s novel. Nancy J. Levine and Marian Urquilla, introduction to The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Special Issue on Djuna Barnes ed. Levine and Urquilla Vol. 13, No. 3 (Fall 1993), p. 9.

184 Notes 61. Michele Hannoosh, Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity, p. 4.

Chapter 4 1. In 1918, women over thirty were awarded the right to vote; all women were awarded the right to vote in 1928. 2. ‘Satire is a matter of period. It flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogenous moral standards – the early Roman Empire and eighteenthcentury Europe. It is aimed at inconstancy and hypocrisy. It exposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice is no longer pays lip service to virtue.’ The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh ed. Dunat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 304 as cited in F.H. Buckley, The Morality of Laughter (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 12. 3. Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1938), p. 220. 4. Unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement, 6 September 1934, cited in Martin Stannard (ed.), Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), p. 149. 5. ‘Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.’ T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922), Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), p. 65. 6. See John Carey: ‘Largely through Eliot’s influence, the assumption that most people are dead became, by the 1930s, a standard item in the repertoire of any self-respecting intellectual.’ The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber & Faber), p. 10. 7. The name ‘Cruttwell’ appears attached to a variety of unglamorous characters in Waugh’s fiction, a low-key but enduring revenge against Waugh’s hated Dean of the same name at Hertford College, Oxford. 8. Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (1934; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951), p. 116. All page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition. 9. David Punter, The Literature of Terror, Vol. 2: The Modern Gothic (2nd edition; London: Longman, 1996), pp. 183–184. 10. Waugh in a letter to Henry Yorke (Green), describing Tony Last. Cited in Martin Stannard (ed.), Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 157. 11. Jeffrey Heath, The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and His Writing (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), p. 118. 12. Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh, p. 157. 13. In French, ‘le vitrail’ means ‘stained glass’. 14. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (1932; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 11 (page numbers in the text hereafter). 15. See Faye Hammill, ‘Cold Comfort Farm, D.H. Lawrence and English Literary Culture between the Wars’, Modern Fiction Studies, 47, 4 (Winter 2001),

Notes

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

185

pp. 831–852 for a more detailed examination of the literary sources of Gibbons’s parody, particularly in relation to rural fiction of the period. See Faye Hammill, ibid., for a more detailed examination of Gibbons’s parodic attacks on Lawrence and his works. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, p. 26. The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 140. See Diana Wallace, ‘Revising the Marriage Plot in Women’s Fiction of the 1930s’ in Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History ed. Maroula Joannou (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 64. Although Marie Stopes had published her Married Love in 1918, it was not until the 1930s that local authorities were permitted – but not required – to provide birth control information. ‘By 1937 only 95 out of 423 local authorities had actually authorized birth control advice in their own clinics’: Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914–1959 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 257. Jessica Maynard in Gary Day (ed.), Literature and Culture in Modern Britain, Vol. 2: 1930–1955 (London: Longman, 1997), p. 31. The quotation within this passage is from H.M. Tomlinson’s ‘A Lost Wood’, in The Criterion 10 (29), January 1931. Deirdre Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty: Women Between the Wars 1918–1939 (London: Pandora Press, 1989), p. 9. We owe this information on Battersea, Clapham and Peckham to Dr Chris French of the Local History Research Centre at Kingston University. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. II, p. 2175. Ibid. See The Diary of a Nobody (1892) written by George and Weedon Grossmith. Initially serialized in Punch, this has as its hero, a suburban dweller, Mr Pooter. Six of Comyns’s novels are still available from Virago. They are The Vet’s Daughter; A Touch of Mistletoe; Our Spoons Came from Woolworths; Sisters by a River; Who was Changed and Who was Dead and The Skin Chairs. The Vet’s Daughter became the musical, The Clapham Wonder, written by the composer and lyricist, Sandy Wilson, who is probably best known for The Boyfriend. The musical opened at the Marlow Theatre, Canterbury, in 1978 but did not transfer to London. Jenny Stringer (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Comyns was a great admirer of Dickens’s novels as is evident from, her introduction (written in 1980) to The Vet’s Daughter and the various allusions to his work which crop up in her novels – for example, the whimsical reference to a dogs’ beauty parlour in David Copperfield which can be found in The Juniper Tree (London: Virago, 1985), p. 16. Barbara Comyns, The Vet’s Daughter (1959; London: Virago, 1981), p. 3. Page numbers are given hereafter in the text and refer to this edition. See Wendy B. Faris, ‘Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction’ in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (eds), Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 172.

186 Notes 32. David Punter, ‘Ceremonial Gothic’ in Glennis Byron and David Punter (eds), Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 39, 48. 33. Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘Death’ in Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.), The Handbook to Gothic Literature (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 42. 34. Judy Newman, John Updike (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 129. 35. Muriel Spark, The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 36. All page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition. 36. Alan Bold, Muriel Spark (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 53. 37. Ibid., p. 57. 38. Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology with Commentaries by K. Kerenyi and C.G. Jung (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956). 39. Jarold Ramsey, ‘Crow, or the trickster transformed’ in Keith Sagar (ed.), The Achievement of Ted Hughes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 173, 174. 40. Peter Kemp, Muriel Spark (London: Elek, 1974). 41. Cited in Richard C. Kane, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles: Didactic Demons in Modern Fiction (New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1988), p. 66. 42. Fred Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 172.

Chapter 5 1. Patricia Stubbs, Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel 1880–1920 (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1979), pp. 234–235. 2. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (1972; London: Virago, 1979), p. 191. 3. The League of Gentlemen is a successful British television show that was first broadcast in January 1999. All the characters are performed by three actors in various disguises. Shot in similar territory to Fludd in the Pennines, east of Manchester, this prime example of comic Gothic in popular culture is set in the fictional town of Royston Vasey and has given a new and sinister meaning to the word ‘local’. 4. Hilary Mantel, Fludd (1989; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 12. All page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition. 5. The choice of Sister Philomena’s name, although a common name for Roman Catholic girls, is interesting. St Philomena was a virgin and a martyr; Philomel, the Greek origin of the name, was raped by King Tereus and had her tongue cut out. Later in flight from him, she was turned into a nightingale. Fludd saves Sister Philomena from both virginity and martyrdom and sets her free so that she may, metaphorically, sing. 6. Angela Carter, ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ (1974) in Angela Carter (ed.), Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (London: Virago, 1986). All page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition. 7. Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983; London: Coronet Books, 1987), p. 6. All page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition. 8. Susanne Becker, Gothic Forms of Feminine Fiction (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 191.

Notes

187

9. Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Our Culture of Simulation’ in Fred Botting (ed.), The Gothic (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001), p. 161. 10. Quoted in the front of Vintage edition of the novel. 11. http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/books/sexing_the_cherry.htm. 12. Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (1988; London: Vintage, 1989), p. 24. All page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition. 13. Sara Martin, ‘The Power of Monstrous Women’ in The Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1999), pp. 193–210, 203. 14. Ibid., p. 201. 15. Ibid., p. 209. 16. As this book has attempted to demonstrate, this is not a judgement with which we concur. Sybil Korff Vincent, ‘The Mirror and the Cameo: Margaret Atwood’s Comic/Gothic Novel’ in Juliann Fleenor (ed.), The Female Gothic (Montreal: Eden Press, 1983), p. 153. 17. Coral Ann Howells, Margaret Atwood (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 62. 18. Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (1976; London: Virago Press, 1982), p. 225. All page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition. 19. Susanne Becker, Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions, p. 184. 20. Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (New York and London: Routledge, 1982) and Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 21. Margaret Atwood, interview with Karla Hammond (1978) quoted in Earl G. Ingersoll (ed.), Margaret Atwood: Conversations (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1990), p. 107. 22. Margaret Atwood, interview with Susanne Becker, cited in Susanne Becker, Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions, p. 190. 23. Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary EnglishCanadian Fiction (Oxford and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 146. 24. Atwood, interview with Karla Hammond (1978) quoted in Earl G. Ingersoll (ed.), Margaret Atwood: Conversations, p. 107. 25. Interview with Betsy Draine (April 1981) quoted in L.S. Dembo, Interviews with Contemporary Writers (Second Series 1972–1982) (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), p. 380. 26. Eleonora Reo, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle: Writing against Notions of Unity’ in Colin Nicholson (ed.), Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), p. 142. 27. Susanne Becker, Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions, p. 196. 28. See, for example, Barbara Hill Rigney, Margaret Atwood (London: Macmillan, 1987). 29. See, for example, Sonia Mycak, In Search of the Split Subject: Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, and the Novels of Margaret Atwood (Toronto: ECW Press, 1996). 30. Interview with Betsy Draine (April 1981) quoted in L.S. Dembo, Interviews with Contemporary Writers, pp. 379–380. 31. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 32. Lucie Armitt, ‘The Fragile Frames of The Bloody Chamber’ in Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (eds), The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter (London: Longman, 1997), p. 89.

188 Notes 33. Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (1979; London: Vintage, 1995), p. 40. All page references, which will appear hereafter in the text, are to this edition. 34. Aidan Day, Angela Carter: The Rational Glass (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 156. 35. Lucie Armitt, ‘The Fragile Frames of The Bloody Chamber’, p. 92. 36. Ibid., p. 93. 37. Cited in Gina Wisker, ‘Revenge of the Living Doll: Angela Carter’s Horror Writing’ in Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (eds), The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter, p. 128. 38. Robert Phiddian, cited in Simon Dentith, Parody, pp. 15–16. 39. Linda Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, p. 26.

Chapter 6 1. Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 18. Roper and Tosh cite the experience of male office clerks in the late Victorian period and the development of the Boy Scout movement in 1908 as other example of the modern era. 2. The conservative junior minister, Alan Clarke, notorious for his amorous adventures (documented in two entertaining published volumes of diaries) confessed to finding Mrs Thatcher sexually attractive and often referred to her as ‘the lady’. 3. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge and Chapman Hall, 1990), pp. 146–147. 4. Arthur Brittan, Masculinity and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 4. 5. Ibid., p. 3. 6. Cyndy Hendershot, The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 4. Hendershot goes on to say: ‘While reactions to this fragility vary, the Gothic is preoccupied with the precarious alignment of the whole male subject and the fragile, individual men who attempt to represent the male subject. From Ambrosio’s loss of his position as whole and untainted monk to the depletion of the vampire hunters’ blood supply to Kurtz’s loss of his European ego to Rochester’s maimed body, the Gothic continually reveals the gulf between the actual male subject and the myth of masculinity.’ 7. Philip Hensher in The Observer, quoted in the frontispiece to the Penguin edition of Martha Peake (London: Penguin Books, 2000). 8. Alan MacGillivray, ‘The Worlds of Iain Banks’, The Association for Scottish Literary Studies http://www.gla.ac.uk/ScotLit/ASLS/No Frames/Laverock-Iain_ Banks2.html (accessed 3.10.03). 9. Both these quotations can be found in the opening pages of the Abacus 2000 edition of the novel. 10. Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 154. 11. Cauldhame – literally ‘cold home’ sounds similar to ‘Caulfield’, the name of Salinger’s anti-hero. 12. Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory (1984; London: Abacus, 2000), p. 59. All quotations which appear hereafter in the text are from this edition.

Notes

189

13. Berthold Schoene-Harwood, Writing Men: Literary Masculinities from Frankenstein to the New Man (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 104. 14. Dogs function in this text much as they do in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: they are both the victims of appalling cruelty and emblems of the bestiality in human beings. 15. Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow, p. 154. 16. Plasticine is a modelling substance which has been traditionally used by children. The use of the word connoting something associated with play and childhood has, in this context, an uncanny effect. 17. See, for example, the description of ‘obnoxious insects’ and ‘reptiles’ that crawl over the body of Agnes and her dead baby in The Monk (Matthew Lewis, The Monk [1796; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], p. 415. 18. Margaret Thatcher was reported as saying this in an interview with Woman’s Own magazine, 3 October 1987. Banks makes no secret of his anti-Tory sentiments: he was reported in one interview to be wearing an expensive shirt bearing the monogram ‘FTT’ which he explained as standing for a political position: ‘F*** the Tories’ (http://homepages.compuserve.de/Mostral/interviews/wired96.htm, accessed 21/09/03). 19. Berthold Schoene-Harwood, Writing Men, p. 116. 20. Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 162. 21. Bradford Morrow and Patrick McGrath (eds), The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction (New York: Random House, 1991), p. xiv. 22. Patrick McGrath in an interview with Gilles Menegaldo, 1998 (www.paradigme. com/sources/SOURCES-PDF/Pages%20de%20Sources05-2-2.pdf). 23. Patrick McGrath, Blood and Water and Other Tales (1988; London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 172, 173. 24. Cyndy Hendershot, The Animal Within, p. 70. Fludd, the twentieth-century incarnation of the seventeenth-century alchemist, comes out of that hermetic tradition. 25. Patrick McGrath’s father was the medical superintendent of Broadmoor, Britain’s most well-known hospital for the criminally insane, for many years when McGrath was growing up. He acknowledges that this background has a profound effect on his fiction. 26. Lyn Pykett, Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1995), p. 30. 27. Arthur Brittan, Masculinity and Power, p. 10. 28. McGrath appears to be parodying a familiar image from horror movies. The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) features the severed hand of a concert pianist, which wreaks havoc. The disembodied hand turns up in the comic Gothic film of The Addams Family (1991), in which ‘Thing’ is a member of the household and performs useful chores. 29. For two recent essays on masturbation in Gothic fiction see Diane Mason, ‘“A very devil with the men”: The Pathology and Iconography of the Erotic Consumptive and the Attractive Masturbator’ in Gothic Studies 2/2 (August 2000), pp. 205–217 and Robert Mighall ‘“A pestilence which walketh in darkness”: Diagnosing the Victorian vampire’ in Glennis Byron and David Punter (eds), Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999), pp. 108–124.

190 Notes 30. Schubert wrote a suite with this name in 1817, for example. 31. Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque (1989; London: Penguin Books, 1990). 32. David Hughes in Mail on Sunday, as quoted on the back of the cover of the Penguin edition. 33. Interview with Gilles Menegaldo, p. 112. 34. Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), p. 95. 35. McGrath agrees that Mrs Giblet is a Dickensian grotesque: ‘This would be an instance of the Dickensian grotesque which would be the exaggeration of moral and physical features of the characters until they became caricatures of recognizable human types’ (interview with Gilles Menegaldo, p. 114). 36. ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there’ (L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between [1953; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970], p. 1). McGrath’s Spider (1991) and Asylum (1996) are both set in the 1950s and Dr Haggard’s Disease (1993) is set just before and during the Second World War. Martha Peake (2000) is an exception to these mid-twentieth-century settings, the action taking place in the 1770s. 37. Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 415. 38. In his interview with Gilles Menegaldo, McGrath speaks of his concept of ‘the grotesque as that which breaks down distinct categories, distinct orders of being’. 39. Allon White and Peter Stallybrass, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 44. 40. Ibid., p. 51. 41. ‘So-called “homosexual panic” is the most private psychologized form in which many twentieth-century western men experience their vulnerability to the social pressures of homophobic blackmail; even for them, however, that is only one path of control, complementary to public sanctions through the institutions described by Foucault and others as defining and regulating the amorphous territory of “the sexual”’ (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men [New York: Columbia University Press, 1985], p. 89). 42. Interview with Gilles Menegaldo, p. 115.

Bibliography Primary texts Atwood, Margaret Surfacing (1972; London: Virago, 1979). —— Lady Oracle (1976; London: Virago Press, 1982). —— The Robber Bride (London: Bloomsbury, 1993). Austen, Jane Northanger Abbey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972). Baldick, Chris The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Banks, Iain The Wasp Factory (1984; London: Abacus, 2000). Barnes, Djuna Nightwood (1936; London: Faber & Faber, 1985). Barrett, Eaton Stannard The Heroine, ed. Walter Raleigh (London: Henry Frowde, 1909). Carter, Angela Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (London: Quartet Books, 1974). —— ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ (1974) in Angela Carter (ed.), Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (London: Virago, 1986). —— The Bloody Chamber (1979; London: Vintage, 1995). Comyns, Barbara The Vet’s Daughter (1959; London: Virago, 1981). Du Maurier, George Trilby (1894; London: J.M. Dent, 1992). Edgeworth, Maria Castle Rackrent and Ennui, ed. Marilyn Butler (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992). Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land (1922), Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1963). Gibbons, Stella Cold Comfort Farm (1932; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994). Hoffmann, E.T.A. ‘The Sandman’ in Tales of Hoffmann, trans. James Kirkup (London and Glasgow: Blackie, 1966). Lennox, Charlotte The Female Quixote or the Adventures of Arabella, edited by Margaret Dalziel and introduced by Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Lewis, Matthew The Monk (1796; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). McGrath, Patrick Blood and Water and Other Tales (1988; London: Penguin, 1989). —— The Grotesque (1989; London: Penguin Books, 1990). Mantel, Hilary Fludd (1989; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999). Meredith, George The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). —— The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871; London: Constable, 1914). —— The Egoist (1879; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). Morrow, Bradford and Patrick McGrath (eds) The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction (New York: Random House, 1991). Radcliffe, Ann The Italian: Or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Reeve, Clara The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story, ed. J. Trainer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). 191

192 Bibliography Spark, Muriel The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963). Stoker, Bram Dracula (1897; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Walpole, Horace The Castle of Otranto, Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). Waugh, Evelyn Vile Bodies (1930; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1938). —— A Handful of Dust (1934; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951). Weldon, Fay The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983; London: Coronet Books, 1987). Winterson, Jeanette Sexing the Cherry (1988; London: Vintage, 1989).

Critical texts Adorno, T.W. Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Andriano, Joseph Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction (University Park, PA.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993). Armitt, Lucie ‘The Fragile Frames of The Bloody Chamber’ in Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (eds), The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter (London: Longman, 1997). Armstrong, Nancy Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Auerbach, Nina Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). —— Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Baldick, Chris In Frankenstein’s Shadow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Baudelaire, Charles ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne (1863; Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1964). Beattie, James ‘On Laughter and Ludicrous Composition’ in Essays: On Poetry and Music, edited by Roger J. Robinson (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1996). Becker, Susanne Gothic Forms of Feminine Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Beddoe, Deirdre Back to Home and Duty: Women Between the Wars 1918–1939 (London: Pandora Press, 1989). Beer, Gillian Meredith: A Change of Masks (London: Athlone Press, 1970). Benjamin, Walter Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1973). Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory: Key Critical Concepts (London and New York: Prentice-Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995). Benstock, Shari Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940 (1987; London: Virago Press, 1994). Berger, Peter Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1997). Bold, Alan Muriel Spark (London: Methuen, 1986). Botting, Fred Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996). Botting, Fred (ed.) The Gothic (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001).

Bibliography 193 Brittan, Arthur Masculinity and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). Broe, Lynn Mary (ed.) Silence and Power: A Re-Evaluation of Djuna Barnes (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 1991). Bronfen, Elisabeth ‘Death’ in Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.), The Handbook to Gothic Literature (London: Macmillan, 1998). Brooks, Peter The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976; 2nd edition 1995). Buckley, F.H. The Morality of Laughter (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003). Butler, Harriet Jessie and Harold Edgeworth Butler The Black Book of Edgeworthstown and Other Edgeworth Memories, 1585–1817 (London: Faber & Faber, 1927). Butler, Judith Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge and Chapman Hall, 1990). Butler, Marilyn Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). —— ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland: History, Popular Culture, and Secret Codes’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 4, 2 (2001), 267–292. Byron, Glennis and David Punter (eds) Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). Carey, John The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1992). Cavaliero, Glen The Alchemy of Laughter: Comedy in English Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). Cheyette, Bryan Constructions of the Jew in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Cheyette, Bryan and Laura Marcus (eds) Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’ (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). Chisholm, Diane ‘Obscene Modernism: Eros Noir and the Profane Illumination of Djuna Barnes’ in American Literature 69, 1 (March 1997), 167–206. Clery, E.J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Clery, E.J. and Robert Miles (eds) Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Cottom, Daniel The Civilized Imagination: A Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Daemmrich, Horst S. The Shattered Self in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Tragic Vision (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973). Dalton, Anne B. ‘“This is Obscene”: Female Voyeurism, Sexual Abuse, and Maternal Power in The Dove’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, 3 (Fall 1993), 107–116. Davenport-Hines, Richard Gothic: 400 Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (London: Fourth Estate, 1998). Davison, Neil R. ‘“The Jew” as Homme/Femme-Fatale: Jewish (Art)ifice, Trilby and Dreyfus’, Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society 8, 2–3 (2002), 73–111. Day, Aidan Angela Carter: The Rational Glass (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Day, Gary (ed.) Literature and Culture in Modern Britain, Vol. 2: 1930–1955 (London: Longman, 1997).

194 Bibliography Dembo, L.S. Interviews with Contemporary Writers (Second Series 1972–1982) (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). Denisoff, Dennis ‘“Men of My Own Sex”: Genius, Sexuality, and George du Maurier’s Artists’ in Richard Dellamora (ed.), Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999). Dentith, Simon Parody (London: Routledge, 2000). DuPlessis, Rachel Blau Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of TwentiethCentury Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). Dyer, Gary British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, 23) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Eco, Umberto ‘The Frames of Comic “Freedom”’ in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Carnival! (Berlin: Monton Publishers, 1984). Ellis, Kate Ferguson The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Epstein, Julia and Kristina Straub (eds) Body Guards (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Favret, Mary A. and Nicola J. Watson (eds) At the Limits of Romanticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Fleenor, Julianne E. (ed.) The Female Gothic (Montreal and London: The Eden Press, 1983). Fletcher, Ian Meredith Now (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971). Freud, Sigmund ‘The “Uncanny”’ (1919) in Sigmund Freud: The Penguin Freud Library (London: Penguin Books, 1985), Vol. 14 ‘Art and Literature’. Gelder, Ken Reading the Vampire (London: Routledge, 1994). Gilder, J.L. and J.B. Trilbyana: The Rise and Progress of a Popular Novel (New York: Critic Company, 1895). Glover, Susan ‘Glossing the Unvarnished Tale: Contra-dicting Possession in Castle Rackrent’, Studies in Philology 99, 3 (2002), 295–311. Halberstam, Judith Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995). Hammill, Faye ‘Cold Comfort Farm, D.H. Lawrence and English Literary Culture between the Wars’, Modern Fiction Studies 47, 4 (Winter 2001), 831–852. Handwerk, Gary Irony and Ethics in Narrative Structure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Hannoosh, Michele Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). Heath, Jeffrey The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and His Writing (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1982). Hendershot, Cyndy The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). Herring, Phillip ‘Zadel Barnes: Journalist’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, 3 (Fall 1993), 107–116. —— The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (New York: Viking, 1995). Hogle, Jerrold E. ‘The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection’ in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Blackwell, 2000), 293–304. —— ‘Our Culture of Simulation’ in Fred Botting (ed.), The Gothic (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001), 153–179. —— ‘Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture’ in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–20.

Bibliography 195 Hollingworth, Brian Maria Edgeworth’s Irish Writing: Language, History, Politics (London: Macmillan, 1997). Horner, Avril ‘“A Detour of Filthiness”: French fiction and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood’ in A. Horner (ed.), European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 230–251. Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik ‘Strolling in the Dark: Gothic Flânerie in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood’ in Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace (eds), Gothic Modernisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 78–94. Howard, Jacqueline Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Howells, Coral Ann Margaret Atwood (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Hutcheon, Linda A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (London: Methuen, 1985). Hutcheon, Linda The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary EnglishCanadian Fiction (Oxford and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988). Huysman, J.-K. Against Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Ingersoll, Earl G. (ed.) Margaret Atwood: Conversations (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1990). John, Juliet Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Johnson, Claudia Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988). Kane, Richard C. Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles: Didactic Demons in Modern Fiction (New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1988). Kayser, Wolfgang The Grotesque in Art and Literature, translated by Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957). Kelly, Gary ‘“Unbecoming a Heroine”: Novel Reading, Romanticism, and Barrett’s The Heroine’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 45, 2 (September 1990), 220–241. Kelly, Richard The Art of George du Maurier (Hants: Scolar, 1996). Kelvin, Norman A Troubled Eden: Nature and Society in the Works of George Meredith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961). Kemp, Peter Muriel Spark (London: Elek, 1974). Kirkpatrick, Kathryn ‘“Going to Law about that Jointure”: Women and Property in Castle Rackrent’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 22, 1 (1996), 21–29. Koestler, Arthur Insight and Outlook (London: Macmillan, 1949). Kristeva, Julia Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Lamb, Jonathan ‘The Comic Sublime and Sterne’s Fiction’ in Richard Kroll (ed.), The English Novel: Smollett to Austen (London and New York: Longman, 1998). Levine, George and U.C. Knoepflmacher (eds) The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1979). Levine, Nancy J. and Marian Urquilla Introduction to The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Special Issue on Djuna Barnes, ed. Levine and Urquilla 13, 3 (Fall 1993). Lévy, Maurice Le Roman ‘Gothique’ Anglaise 1764–1824 (Toulouse: Université de Toulouse, 1968) as it appears in Romantic Reassessment Vol. 3 ‘Collateral Gothic 1’, ed. Thomas Meade Harwell (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1986). Lewis, Paul ‘Gothic and Mock Gothic: The Repudiation of Fantasy in Barrett’s Heroine’, English Language Notes 21, 1 (September 1983), 45–52.

196 Bibliography —— ‘Poe’s Humor: A Psychological Analysis’ in Studies in Short Fiction 26 (1989), 531–546. —— Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). Lindsay, Jack George Meredith (London: Bodley Head, 1956). Lloyd-Smith, Allan and Victor Sage (eds) Gothick Origins and Innovations (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1994). McGlathery, James Mysticism and Sexuality: E.T.A. Hoffmann (Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1981). Marcus, Jane ‘Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic’ in M.L. Broe (ed.), Silence and Power: A Re-Evaluation of Djuna Barnes (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 221–250. Martin, Sara ‘The Power of Monstrous Women’ in The Journal of Gender Studies 8, 2 (1999), 193–210. Mason, Diane ‘“A Very Devil with the Men”: the Pathology and Iconography of the Erotic Consumptive and the Attractive Masturbator’ in Gothic Studies 2, 2 (August 2000), 205–217. Meredith, George An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (1877; London: Constable, 1919). Mighall, Robert ‘“A Pestilence which Walketh in Darkness”: Diagnosing the Victorian Vampire’ in Glennis Byron and David Punter (eds), Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999), 108–124. Miles, Robert Gothic Writing 1750–1820 (2nd edition, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002 [1993]). Millett, Kate Sexual Politics (1969; London: Virago, 1977). Mitchell, Juliet Women: The Longest Revolution (London: Virago, 1984). Modleski, Tania Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (New York and London: Routledge, 1982). Moran, Leslie J. ‘Law and the Gothic Imagination’ in Fred Botting (ed.), The Gothic (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), 87–109. Mueller, W.R. ‘Theological Dualism and the ‘System’ in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel’, Journal of English Literary History, 18, 2 (1951), 138–154. Mulvey-Roberts, Marie (ed.) The Handbook to Gothic Literature (London: Macmillan, 1998). Mycak, Sonia In Search of the Split Subject: Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, and the Novels of Margaret Atwood (Toronto: ECW Press, 1996). Napier, Elizabeth R. The Failure of Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an EighteenthCentury Literary Form (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Neill, Michael ‘Mantles, Quirks, and Irish Bulls: Ironic Guise and Colonial Subjectivity in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent’, The Review of English Studies (New Series) 52, 205 (2001), 76–90. Newman, Judy John Updike (London: Macmillan, 1988). Okin, Susan Moller ‘Women and the Making of the Sentimental Family’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 11 (1982). O’Shaughnessy, David ‘Ambivalence in Castle Rackrent’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 25, 1–2 (1999), 427–440. Paul, William Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia Press, 1994). Phiddian, Robert Swift’s Parody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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Bibliography 199 Wisker, Gina ‘Revenge of the Living Doll: Angela Carter’s Horror Writing’ in Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (eds), The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter (London: Longman, 1997). Wolff, Janet ‘The Artist and the Flâneur: Rodin, Rilke and Gwen John in Paris’ in Keith Tester (ed.), The Flâneur (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). Wolfreys, Julian Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, the Uncanny and Literature (London: Palgrave, 2002). Wylie, J.C.W. Irish Land Law (Abingdon, Oxon: Professional Books Ltd, 1975).

Internet sources Banks, Iain http://homepages.compuserve.de/Mostral/interviews/wired96.ht. Belanger, Jacqueline ‘Some Preliminary Remarks on the Production and Reception of Fiction Relating to Ireland, 1800–1829’, Cardiff Corvey Articles Vol. IV No. 2 (www.cf.ac.uk/ncap/corvey/articles/cc04)ml. Kent, David A. ‘On Gary Dyer’s British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832’, Romantic Circles Reviews, Romantic Circles (www.rc.umd.edu/reviews/dyer). MacGillivray, Alan ‘The Worlds of Iain Banks’, The Association for Scottish Literary Studies http://www.gla.ac.uk/ScotLit/ASLS/No Frames/Laverock-Iain_Banks2.html. Menegaldo, Gilles Interview with Patrick McGrath (1998) www.paradigme.com/ sources/SOURCES-PDF/Pages%20de%20Sources05–2–2.pdf. Poe, Edgar Allan (?) Review of The Heroine from Southern Literary Messenger 1835 (41–43) (www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/slm35b04; 13 June 1999). Winterson, Jeanette http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/books/sexing_the_ cherry.htm.

Index absurd, the, 15, 90 Act of Union, the, 27 Addams Family, The, 15 Adorno, Theodor, 91 alchemy, 52, 118–19 ‘ambiguous Gothic’, 51, 70, 81 Andersen, Hans Christian, 124 Aristotle, 13 Armitt, Lucie, 132, 133 Atwood, Margaret Lady Oracle, 117, 122, 123, 128–32 Surfacing, 116 The Robber Bride, 127–8 Auerbach, Nina, 79 Austen, Jane, 57, 68, 103 Emma, 101 Northanger Abbey, 19, 21, 28, 32, 41, 45, 61, 82 Pride and Prejudice, 62 automaton/mechanical doll, 17, 18, 133–4, 166 Bainbridge, Beryl, 116 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 8, 13, 14, 160 Baldick, Chris The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, 11 Banks, Iain The Wasp Factory, 138–40, 145 barbaric, the, 1, 43, 97 Barber, C.L., 13 Barnes, Djuna Nightwood, 15, 69, 70, 85–94, 95 Barrett, Eaton Stannard The Heroine, 15, 16, 19, 21, 27–39, 44, 45, 82, 128 Barrie, J.M., 78 Baudelaire, Charles, 92, 93, 155–6 Baudrillard, Jean Symbolic Exchange and Death, 10 Beast with Five Fingers, The, 153 Beautiful, 6, 13, 38, 40, 42 Becker, Susanne, 124, 128, 131

Beckett, Samuel, 85 Beddoe, Deirdre, 105 Belanger, Jacqueline, 38 Benjamin, Walter, 92 Bennett, Andrew, 14 Bentley, Eric, 8 Berger, Peter, 9, 14, 18 Bergonzi, Bernard, 141 Bergson, Henri, 13, 17 Black Book of Edgeworthstown, The, 19–20, 24 black comedy/humour, 14, 101, 133 Blau duPlessis, Rachel, 104 Bold, Alan, 112 Book of Revelations, The, 153 Booth, Wayne, 43 Botting, Fred, 2, 14, 114 boundaries, 1, 2, 8, 17, 21, 26, 33, 83, 85, 87, 89–90, 93, 97, 106, 110, 119, 122, 133, 150, 159 Brittain, Vera, 104 Brittan, Arthur, 137, 153 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 109 Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre, 127 Brontë, Emily, 101 Wuthering Heights, 102 Brooks, Peter, 2, 3, 11 Burke, Edmund A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 50 Burney, Fanny, 19 Camilla, 19 Cecilia, 19, 31 Evelina, 31, 34 Butler, Judith, 89, 125, 137, 144 Butler, Marilyn, 20, 21, 26, 27, 41 carnival, 8, 13, 16, 121, 133, 160 Carson, Frank, 9 200

Index 201 Carter, Angela, 16, 116, 127 The Bloody Chamber, 117, 132, 157 ‘The Lady of the House of Love’, 117, 133–5 ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’, 117, 120–2 Cathcart, Lady, 22 Cavaliero, Glen, 31 Céline, Louis Ferdinand, 85 Cheyette, Brian, 78 Cinderella, 130 Clery, E.J., 4, 5, 25, 26, 29 Collins, Wilkie The Woman in White, 39 comic, the, 13–15, 40, 42, 57, 93 Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 107 Comyns, Barbara The Vet’s Daughter, 95, 106, 107–10, 112 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness, 84, 101 Cottom, Daniel, 35 Curel, François de, 92 Daemmrich, Horst S., 52 Darwin, Charles The Origin of Species, 81, 84 Davenport-Hines, Richard, 4 Davison, Neil R., 70, 79 Day, Aidan, 132 ‘Death and the Maiden’, 154 Dennis, John, 7 Dentith, Simon, 11 Dependency of Ireland Act (1782), 24 Dickens, Charles, 9, 15, 99, 100, 159 Bleak House, 39 Oliver Twist, 79 Divine, 137 Doody, Margaret Anne, 29, 32 doppelgänger, 4, 27, 33, 36, 71 Drabble, Margaret, 116 Dracula: Undead and Loving It, 15 Dreyfus affair, 79 du Maurier, George, 83, 86, 92 Trilby, 51, 69–70, 71–85, 95, 144 Dumas, Alexandre, 82 duPlessis, Rachel Blau, 131–2

Dyer, Gary, 40 Eco, Umberto, 16 Edgeworth, Maria, 19–27 Belinda, 19 Castle Rackrent, 19–27, 44, 45, 157 Ennui, 21, 26 Eliot, T.S. ‘The Waste Land’, 97, 99 Falklands War, 137 Fielding, Henry, 57 Financial Times, The, 138 flâneur, the, 91–3 Fleenor, Juliann, 128 Foucault, Michel, 40, 158 French Revolution, the, 9, 27 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 13, 46, 47, 80, 151 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 14 ‘The Uncanny’, 2, 149 Totem and Taboo, 162 Frye, Northrop, 13, 15 Galt, John, 57 Gelder, Ken, 79 Gibbons, Stella Cold Comfort Farm, 3, 15, 95, 96, 101–4, 157 Glover, Susan, 27 Golding, William The Lord of the Flies, 138 Goldsmith, Oliver, 57 Gothic writing and abjection, 2, 10 as spectrum, 4 as therapy, 2 and authenticity, 10 and boundaries, see boundaries definitions of, 1 English national identity, 5 and fakery, 6, 10, 11 and gender, 20, 26, 34, 43, 45, 49, 51, 55, 59, 69, 70, 72, 74–5, 81, 84–5, 89, 94, 101, 120, 124, 136–8, 140–4, 148–9, 150, 152, 161, 164

202 Index Gothic writing – continued and hybridity, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 12, 44, 46, 52, 70, 71, 82, 84, 116 and incongruity, see incongruity as comic effect and melodrama, 2, 6, 7, 8, 10 and modernity, 7, 10, 11, 12 and opera, 7, 8 and parody, 11–12, 15, 41, 45, 57, 86, 88, 89, 94–6, 98, 101–3, 109, 117, 121, 127, 130–2, 135, 136–7, 141, 153, 165–6 and playfulness, 10 and Roman Catholicism, 117–20, 123, 146, 162, 177n38 and science, 17 and self-parody, 11, 15, 45 and simulacra, 10 and the circus, 6, 7 and the counterfeit, 10 and the Enlightenment, 2, 3 and the framing tale, 10 and the law, 20 and transcendence/loss of transcendence, 3, 11, 15 and ‘uncanny’, the, 3, 4, 18, 46–7, 49–51, 72, 74, 78, 81, 85, 93, 110, 111, 115, 118–20, 127, 136, 149 ‘graveyard’ or ‘gallows’ humour, 15 Gray, Alastair Lanark, 141 grotesque, the, 15–16, 17 grotesque body, the, 16 Hairspray, 137 Halberstam, Judith, 79, 125, 144 Handwerk, Gary, 58 Hannoosh, Michele, 93 Hartley, L.P., 159 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 52, 55 Hazlitt, William, 13 Hendershot, Cyndy, 138, 148 Hoffman, Dustin, 137 Hoffman, E.T.A., 46 ‘The Sandman’, 46–52, 71, 77, 80, 81, 84, 110, 136

Hogg, James The Confessions of Justified Sinner, 112, 141 Hogle, Jerrold E., 10, 11 Hollingworth, Brian, 21 Howard, Jacqueline, 30 Hutcheon, Linda, 11, 30, 31, 34, 39, 40, 103, 129, 135 Huxley, Aldous Brave New World, 96 incongruity as comic effect, 3, 13, 50, 54, 102, 107, 133, 139, 147, 151, 162, 166, 170n50 ‘Inverse sublime’, the, 13, 42 Irving, Washington, 52 Johnson, Samuel Rasselas, 31 Jones, Ernest, 151, 152 Jonson, Ben Bartholomew Fair, 125 Joyce, James Ulysses, 86 Jung, Carl, 113 Kaye-Smith, Sheila, 101 Kayser, Wolfgang The Grotesque in Art and Literature, 15–16, 17, 18, 50 Kelly, Gary, 30, 31, 34 Kemp, Peter, 113 Kent, David, 40 Kierkegaard, Søren, 91 Kirkpatrick, Kathryn, 24 Koestler, Arthur, 14 Kristeva, Julia, 87, 138 Lamb, Jonathan, 33 Lawrence, D.H., 101 Leach, Edmund, 160 League of Gentlemen, The, 117 Lee, Christopher, 17 Lennox, Charlotte The Female Quixote or The Adventures of Arabella, 29 Levine, Nancy J., 93 Lévy, Maurice, 1

Index 203 Lewis, Matthew The Monk, 7, 8, 86, 117, 142, 159 Lewis, Paul, 3, 30 Local Government Act, 1988, 137 Losey, Joseph The Servant, 164 McEvoy, Emma, 7 MacGillivray, Alan, 138 McGlathery, James, 51 McGrath, Patrick, 3, 145 Blood and Water, 145 ‘Blood and Water’, 145–50 The Grotesque, 155–64 ‘The Hand of a Wanker’, 153–5 ‘The Skewer’, 146, 150–3 Malkoff, Karl, 113 manichaeism, 2, 55, 57 Mantel, Hilary Fludd, 116–20, 127 Marcus, Jane, 87 Marriage Act of 1753, 6 Married Women’s Property Act (1870), 37 Maturin, Charles Robert Melmoth the Wanderer, 45 Maynard, Jessica, 104 melodrama, 2, 6, 10, 11 Melville, Herman, 148, 155 Meredith, George, 13, 52–68 An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit, 57–9 The Adventures of Harry Richmond, 53–4, 127 The Egoist, 59–68, 78, 132, 146, 156, 157 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 54–7 metafiction, 7, 12 Miles, Robert, 29 Milton, John Paradise Lost, 10, 38 Modleski, Tania, 129 Moers, Ellen Literary Women, 131 Moran, Leslie J., 39, 42 Mudie’s, 68 Napier, Elizabeth, 6 Neill, Michael, 24–5, 26

‘New Woman’, 80, 84 Newman, Judy, 110 nihilism, 15 Nordau, Max Degeneration, 150 Offenbach Tales of Hoffman, 46 Okin, Susan, 38 Orlan, 125 ‘other’, the, 1, 79–80, 84, 93 Owenson, Sydney The Wild Irish Girl, 37, 38 parody, 11–12, 34, 39, 44, 45, 57, 86, 88, 89, 94–6, 98, 101–3, 109, 117, 121, 127, 130–2, 135, 136–7, 141, 153, 165–6 pastiche, 12, 137, 145 Paul, William, 18 Peacock, Thomas Love Nightmare Abbey, 19, 41 Phiddian, Robert, 11, 43, 135 Pick, Daniel, 50, 51, 71, 78, 83, 85 Poe, Edgar Allan, 29, 52, 156, 158 Powys, John Cowper, 101 Priestley, J.B., 54 Pritchett, V.S., 53 Punch, 71 Punter, David, 1, 97, 109 Pygmalion, 124 Pykett, Lyn, 150 Quixote, Don, 29 Radcliffe, Ann, 19, 22, 41 The Italian, 7–9, 31 The Mysteries of Udolpho, 31, 36 Radin, Paul, 113 Radway, Janice, 129 Raleigh, Walter, 27–8, 29–30 Ramsey, Jarold, 113 Rank, Otto, 151 Reeve, Clara The Old English Baron, 6 Reo, Eleonora, 130

204 Index Richardson, Samuel Clarissa, 31 Pamela, 31 Sir Charles Grandison, 31 Richter, Jean Paul School for Aesthetics, 13, 41 Robbins, Ruth, 52 Roche, Maria de la Children of the Abbey, 31 Rocky Horror Picture Show, The, 15 Romanticism, 11, 35, 40 Roper, Michael, 136 Rose, Margaret, 11 Roussea, J.J. La Nouvelle Héloïse, 31 Royle, Nicholas, 14, 18 Russo, Mary, 16, 71 Sade, Marquis de, 87 Sadleir, Michael, 31 Sage, Victor, 3, 9 Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye, 138 Sayers, Dorothy L., 104 Schmid, Thomas H., 40, 42 Schoene-Harwood, Berthold, 140–1, 143 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 2, 72, 161 Shakespeare, William, 5, 8 A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, 8 Hamlet, 8 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 34 The Winter’s Tale, 124 Shelley, Mary Frankenstein, 2, 10, 16, 17, 124, 125, 138, 141, 142, 148 Shields, Carol, vi, 166 Showalter, Elaine, 78, 80, 83 Smith, Stevie, 107 Spark, Muriel The Ballad of Peckham Rye, 95, 106, 110–15, 117, 118 Spitting Image, 136–7 spoof, 15, 165 Staël, Madame de Corinne, 31 Stallybrass, Peter, 16, 160 Sterne, Lawrence Tristram Shandy, 29

Stevenson, Robert Louis The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 2, 16, 39, 71, 72, 106, 141, 144, 163 Stevick, Philip, 3, 8, 9 Stoker, Bram Dracula, 2, 9, 71, 78, 80, 83, 86, 106, 110, 119, 144 Stubbs, Patricia, 116 Sunday Express, The, 138 Swift, Jonathan, 11 taboo, 1, 161 Teiresias, 143 Tester, Keith, 92 Thatcher, Margaret, 136–7, 142 Tootsie, 137 Tosh, John, 136 transgression, 16, 34, 87, 103, 116, 122 travesty, 12 trickster, the, 110–13 Updike, John, 110 Urquilla, Marian, 93 vampire, the, 12, 133–4, 144, 180n8, 188n6, 189n29 Varma, Devendra The Gothic Flame, 29, 41 Veeder, William, 11 Vidler, Anthony, 18 Vincent, Sybil Korff, 3, 128, 132 Voltaire, 5 Walpole, Horace, 3, 41, 98 The Castle of Otranto, 3, 4–6, 7, 10, 20, 22, 25, 45 Wandering Jew, the, 70 Waugh, Evelyn A Handful of Dust, 15, 95, 96–101, 103, 104, 146, 156 Black Mischief, 96 Brideshead Revisited, 100 Decline and Fall, 97 Vile Bodies, 96, 97, 98 Webb, Mary Precious Bane, 101 Weimar Congress, 151

Index 205 Weldon, Fay The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, 117, 122–5, 127, 144 Wells, H.G. The Island of Dr. Moreau, 138, 141 Whale, James (Dracula), 17 White, Allon, 16, 160 Williams, Anne, 6, 158 Wilt, Judith, 53, 59 Winterson, Jeanette Sexing the Cherry, 16, 117, 120, 125–8

Wittig, Monique, 116 Wodehouse, P.G., 73 Wolfreys, Julian, 3, 45, 52 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 34 Woolf, Virginia A Room of One’s Own, 103 Orlando, 103 The Voyage Out, 100 Wylie, J.C.W., 25 Zanger, Jules, 79